A MESSAGE FOR ALL SOULS 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



ADeMtationa 
a flDessage for HU Souls 



In /IDemoriam 

Thomas Koberts Slicer, A. M., D. D. 
1847-1916 

a man, virile and peaceable; 

a friend, loyal and inspiring; 

a citizen, devoted to all high causes; 

a minister, consecrated to " the ministry 
... of the Lord Jesus, to testify the 
gospel of the grace of god." 




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MEDITATIONS 



A MESSAGE FOR ALL SOULS 



BY 

Thomas Roberts Slicer, A. M., D. D. 

Author of 

"The Great Affirmations of Religion," "The 

Power and Promise of the Liberal Faith," 

" The Way to Happiness," etc. 



published by 

The Women's Alliance of All Souls Church 

io4 east 20th street, new york city 



~BV4S32 



DEC -6 !3"!9 



Meditations, A Message for All Souls 



Copyright, 1919 

BY 

The Women's Alliance of All Souls' Church 

New York City 

Published November, 1919 

@CU585973 J \ * 



FOREWOBD 

THE note which runs through Doctor Slicer's 
" Meditations " is that of expectancy of good 
from God, God's universe, and God's creature Man. 
He believes with all his heart that God's very essence 
is love, that the universe abounds in beauty and 
loveliness which Man is capable of appreciating and 
responding to, and that in human nature itself there 
are large elements of gentleness, dignity, and sym- 
pathetic loyalty which since history began have been 
winning successive victories over inherited animal 
propensities, barbaric vices, and social and industrial 
wrong-doings. He believes in the gradual triumph 
of good over evil in human society, and in building up 
individual character by making the practice of good 
exclude even the thought of evil. 

Doctor Slicer's " Message for All Souls " is one of 
cheer and hope — "Ever upward God's creations move, 
ever upward God's progressions tend. ' Let not your 
heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.' " It is 
a message appropriate to the Church of All Souls, 
and to the three generations of forward-looking people 
who have worshipped there. 

Thousands of souls in other churches would wel- 
come the message, if it should reach them. The 
whole Christian World needs it. 



Cambridge, Mass., 
30 October. 1919. 







PEAYERS 








Prayer 


PAGE 

of Adoration . . . . 1 


Prayer 


of Thankfulness 






. 29 


Prayer 


for Self- Surrender 






. 43 


Prayer 


for Divine Guidance 




* 


. 59 


Prayer 


for Inspiration . 






. 81 


Prayer 


for Understanding 






. 113 


Prayer 


for Communion . 






. 143 


Prayer 


for Faithfulness 






. 177 


Prayer 


for Purified Desires , 






. 203 



MEDITATIONS 



PAGE 



Foreword . 






V 


The Way of Life 






3 


The Church 






. 31 


The Power of Faith 






44 


The Larger Vision . 






61 


The Growth of the Soul 






. 83 


Life's Purpose . 






. 115 


Keligion . 






. 145 


Jesus of Nazareth . 






. 179 


Immortality . 






, 205 


Acknowledgements . 






, 221 



Zhc mw of Xife 



The test of our being Christian is in the ratio of 
our reproduction. The test of our development is 
what we can convey of the Christ-life. 



H flPessage for HU Souls l 

PRAYER OF ADORATION 

CONSTANT GOD, we adore the faithfulness of 
the Creator, but more do we prostrate our- 
selves in loving adoration before the goodness of 
the Father. In this hour make all Thy goodness 
to pass before us, that we shall believe that holi- 
ness is beauty and righteousness is power. Make, 
to our attentive souls, love and law come full circle 
together, that we may believe and trust whilst we 
adore and worship. Bring Thy knowledge to the 
souls of men. We thank Thee for the way that 
we have been led: it was Thy path, and we have 
been safe. When we could not see the way it was 
Thy path and we could feel Thy guidance, and in 
what our distressed spirits sought too eagerly we 
have come to know Thy quiet and Thy peace. 
Thou who keepest in perfect peace those that trust 
in Thee, may we seek to trust more than we seek 
to be at peace, and so fulfilling the great divine 
condition know the blessedness of those that wait 
patiently for Thee while they rest in Thee. 

Forgive our sins, heal the hurt of our souls, help 
us wherein we are ashamed, and in all things in 
which we have failed, lay Thy hands over the 
feebleness of our own and hold us to the task. 
May Thy strength appear in our weakness, and the 
strength of God marshal us in the way we do not 
know. We remember before Thee those that are in 
deep affliction, though Thou needest not to be 



H /IDessaae for HIl Souls 



reminded. Console them with those consolations 
that come to a quiet heart that waits for Thy 
word; into their darkness shine with Thy light, 
and in their confusion bring them an ordered mind; 
and where they must close their eyes, then carry 
Thou them and their burden, Thou that art the 
constant sustainer of the world. 

Let all the nations of the earth find their peace in 
Thee. Let the nations that mourn know that Thou 
rulest above all rulers, and that Thou art above 
all human authority; and for our own dear nation, 
for our own people for whom Thou hast appointed 
a great task, we pray Thee grant obedience to law 
and reverence for right and the quietness that is 
willing patiently to do Thy will. Let all wisdom 
be given to those that rule and those that obey, 
and let the peace that comes from fidelity possess 
them. We leave our problems to Thee. Thou 
knowest the answer to them all, for the end from 
the beginning Thou hast seen. Let us behold Thee, 
and all our solicitudes shall be assuaged. Amen. 



H /Dessage for HII Souls s 

A Knowledge of Good the Greatest Safeguard 

A KNOWLEDGE of the good is an equipment for 
life. This is a fact at the very foundation of 
all wholesome living. No knowledge of evil so fur- 
nishes a man by acquaintance with it to avoid it, 
as a knowledge of the good teaches him the danger of 
the wrong. As a child born and bred in the high hills 
and open country pines away in the close city streets, 
is oppressed by their impure air, so a soul trained to 
discover the good detects evil as quickly as those 
best acquainted with wrong-doing, with this advan- 
tage: that the evil is known on sight and hated as 
soon as known. This cannot be too much empha- 
sized, — the habit of finding in all things the good. 

Unwholesome Anxieties 

WE mourn at the sight of a young, strong nature 
sapped by dissipation. We mourn that fever 
has taken the place of strength, and the delirium of 
wild life has made impossible the sober thinking 
which grave destinies demand. Is not the case some- 
what similar, when instead of the dissipation of un- 
worthy pleasures we substitute the fever of unwhole- 
some anxieties? Do not these absorb the force we 
need for the very tasks before which love stands 
alarmed? Shall our eyes be dim with tears when 
their clearest vision is needed to lead aright our own 
lives and others by ways that are safe to ends that 
are blessed ? Before we reach the heights of religious 
trust, a lower philosophy cautions us to dismiss, as 



a /EBessaoe for Hil Souls 



far as we may, all hindering, entangling anxieties, 
that we may be at our best, whose best seems all in- 
adequate for that great work, the building up of life 
that may shelter other lives. 

Our Responsibility to the God Who made Us 

WE have a superficial way of saying that we are 
" divinely derived " and then we dismiss the 
statement. You cannot be in any way derived with- 
out the responsibility of the derivation attaching to 
the thing so derived. You cut down an oak and a 
willow and wait for them to burn in two contiguous 
fireplaces. The willow has been fed on water and it 
does not burn well. The oak has been fed on cen- 
turies of compacted life and it kindles slowly until 
it is one coal. So it is not enough to say " God is 
our Father," and then dismiss it; but it is the 
ground of confidence that being so derived we can- 
not be taken out from the life of God; that our 
responsibility is partly due to our divine origin, and 
our confidence reverts where our responsibility is 
charged. 

Two Vexed Questions 

THEEE are two things that disturb us. The first 
is " What am I to do? " The other is, " What is 
to become of me ? " And between these two affrights, 
all their life long some souls have been held in bond- 
age. What am I to do? How can I work out my 
career? How am I to get on? What a useless 



H flDessage for HU Souls 5 

question for a human soul ! There is nothing to be 
done in this world about getting on, except to be fit 
to get on. Any human being who knows any one 
thing well that anybody else wants to know, has an 
audience and a purpose, and an opportunity. Any 
human being that can do anything well that anybody 
wants to have done, is sure of occupation. 

A Real Relationship 

GOD is too beautiful for any human description to 
depict, too real not to compass all the varying 
expressions of our varying experience. It does not 
much matter what the ultimate is, so it be real and 
so the relation be felt. I stand upon a great bridge 
that spans the river, and the fog shuts down and hides 
both piers. But I know the road-bed firm beneath 
me, and that it would not be so firm if not bound at 
either end. The traffic makes it tremble, but not 
with any premonition that it will fall. I can hear 
the strain of its cords, and the chafing of its joints; 
but the relation between the two shores is under me 
and firm, and it is mine; and as I step from one 
position to another, that relation remains firm. I may 
apprehend the pier upon the other side, and call it 
God : but all I ask is that it shall be good sailing or 
good going, and that the relation shall be firm, ex- 
plicit, real. 



6 H message for Hii Souls 

The Soul's Mart of Exchange 

WE take ideas upon the mart of exchange. The 
soul sits central, and the caravans come in 
through the gates of sense. The eye gate, the ear gate, 
all these gates of sense open outward to the world; 
from over the wide world, the marching caravans, 
bearing the traffic of the world's ideas, come in. 
These five great gates of sense are swinging forever, 
and the great burden of the world is rolling through, 
and the central soul sits and assorts its wares and 
chooses what it will. It is doing a thing that is of the 
vastest importance. It is selecting, and assimilating 
and digesting the ideal world into itself. If it is 
only concerned with the worth of the thing that is 
given to it in terms of price, then it is selling forever 
what is ideal for what is carnal. 

The Price of Liberty 

THE very things which cause a real struggle in the 
individual man produce society. The "law 
of being " is that it shall be creative. The conflicts 
of nature, the power of love, the appeals of sin, the 
sense of moral values, the thraldom of circumstance, 
— out of these grow the aggregate we call society. 
Its reality is a tragedy and an opportunity. Its destiny 
is struggle. It is the history of the escape from bar- 
barism. It is the price of liberty. Its self-control 
is the guarantee of its emancipation. There really is 
no room for idle lookers-on where this tragedy is 
going forward. Its reality claims the earnest souls 



H /Message for Hll Souls 



for struggle, and rebukes the idle souls for their sloth. 
It cannot be waved aside; it cannot be accounted 
for by set phrases about the " steady gain of man." 
One Calvary is not enough. There should be a per- 
petual incarnation and an unceasing atonement. 

Free to Seek the Highest 

CHANGING spoke for the large interpretation of 
human liberty in the interest of a deeper relig- 
ious life when he said: " The right to which we are 
bound is not insulated, but connected, and one with 
the infinite rectitude and with all the virtue of all 
being. In following it, we promote the health of 
the universe." 

A great teacher of the present time has said : " The 
paramount aim of religion is to seek with all our 
might the highest welfare of the world we live in, 
and the realization of its ideal greatness and noble- 
ness and blessedness." This is but an elaboration of 
the golden rule announced by Kant : " Act as though 
the principle by which you act were by your will to 
become a universal law of nature." Eeligion is not 
lame nor maimed nor feeble. It stands erect and 
exhorts to freedom with these words: 

"All things are thine estate, yet must 
Thou first display the title deeds, 
And sue the world. Be strong and trust 
High instincts more than all the creeds." 



8 H ZlDessage for BH Soulg 

— — — — —— ____________ __ ___ ___ ____ __ ___ __ ^ 

Man's God and Nature's God are One 

ATO longer is it true that the earthquake shakes 
-*-" and the storm shivers through the air while 
God is only in the " still, small voice"; for the earth- 
quake brings its message that the planet is cooling, 
and making itself more habitable in every part for 
the dwelling of men ; and the storm rages not with 
fierceness, but with that benignity which clears the 
atmosphere and alters the currents of the winds and 
the tides of the sea. The " still, small voice " is 
heard through it all, and all is well. Man listens for 
the voices within; and all these that were the jarring 
notes of nature find rhythm and beauty and harmony 
in a world of perfect order that speaks by every voice 
to the man who seeks to know the will of God. 

' We know that all things work together 
for good to them that love God " 

W HAT an y human soul knows, some other human 
soul may find out. If to any human soul a great 
truth is true, it behooves us to find the path by which 
he walked, to discover the springs of his motives, and 
if possible, to verify in the terms of our experience 
that thing which he has found true. St. Paul says, 
"I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor 
angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things 
present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, 
nor any other creation, shall be able to separate us 
from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our 
Lord." " I am persuaded " — that showed argument : 



H /IDessage for Hll Souls 9 

that showed deliberation. If he was persuaded 
and you are not, find out why it is that life's ex- 
perience in you is other than it was in him. 

" We know that to them that love God all things 
work together for good." In our interpretation of 
this, it is our habit to cast the whole contract on 
God and not take our share of the obligation. The 
soul that thinks itself devout and religious has really 
a desire to be good and to have things work out for 
its good. The average such soul waits to be moved 
by the love of God, waits to be led by the providence 
of God, waits for the answer of the prayers itself 
might have answered long ago, and throws the whole 
responsibility of this contract on God. And yet it 
takes God and man to make a loaf of bread. It takes 
God and Stradivarius to make his violin. It takes 
God and man to change weeds into flowers or weeds 
into medical simples. It takes God and man to re- 
buke disease and to weed out and banish the Black 
Death. 

" We know that to them that love God all things 
work together for good." Does this mean that every- 
thing comes out right to the man who loves God 
or does it mean that to the right-minded every- 
thing moves to right ends? The first proposition 
presupposes a love of God that is to be recognized, 
and the second a love of God that recognizes. The 
second looks abroad ; it is the attitude of the expectant 
soul, placing its ordered mind in relation to an 
ordered world. There is no jarring note struck on 
the anvil of the world. It is a rhythmic beat of ham- 



io H /IDessage for HU Souls 

mers, from tlie tiniest beat of the wing of an epheme- 
ral insect to the pulsation of worlds in their flight. 
There is no stroke out of tune. " They work together 
for good." 

I have come upon many people who have ripened 
by the " working together " of the influences of their 
lives. They began crude, rude, cross, immature, with 
jangling motives, inharmonious desires, contending 
forces of the inner life, to be subdued and put into 
shape by the battle of life. And when .you found 
them after a little while, they had simply been put 
into the world in which things work together for 
good, and the crude had turned to refinement, and 
the rudeness to perfect courtesy and the man is the 
angel that was in the block, made beautiful by the 
stroke and pressure of experience of life. All things 
work together for good to the docile soul. The great 
trouble with us is that we resist at every point. We 
insist that instead of being mellow, we shall be hard ; 
instead of being sweet, we shall be acid and have our 
own way ; instead of being plastic, we shall be stub- 
born; so that nothing can work for our good, for we 
do not really love God. 

The Virtues Many, the Vices Few 

rFHE human mind is so constituted that in an 
J- ordered world to the end of time, though there 
must be the same old hideous wrongs, the vices are the 
fewest, and have few variations. From the days of 
Cain who slew his brother and of Jacob who cheated 



H flbcssaQC for HII Souls 11 

his brother, and of David who coveted his neighbor's 
wife, and of Solomon whose wisdom was not self- 
regulative, and of Judas who betrayed for money the 
trust put in him by a friend, the same old column of 
unspeakable wrongs appears. Meantime the crop of 
virtues has multiplied. There are manifold refine- 
ments of virtues, delicacies of mind, touches never 
known to the ancient world; new designs of marvel- 
lous benevolence. The music of life is multiplied, 
and the discords only are the same. That is the 
contribution made by the natural world to our confi- 
dence that things work together for good in this world 
of God. 

The Ordered Mind Matches the Ordered World 

A N ordered mind has relation to an ordered world : 
-£*- and in that mind, the highest function has to do 
with its cause whose insufficient name is God. When 
one stands out as some Arab may have stood yesterday 
and cried, " Allah, cover me with Thy shadow in 
the day when there is no shade but Thy shadow," 
the gravitation of the mind has manifested itself, the 
cohesion of the mind has manifested itself, the ordered 
procession of a soul to its source has manifested itself, 
the abandon of the Moslem to his faith in One has 
manifested itself, and the ordered mind matches the 
ordered world and they work together for good. Do 
the comets come when they are expected? It is by 
the law that was calculated that they come. Do the 
spheres choir in their courses, singing on their way ? 



12 H /Ifcessage for Hll Souls 

It is because they are in a world of beauty and of 
music, and they go the path of their appointment. 
The world is so ordered that when to Asa Gray 
was brought a flower from some tropical country, 
with the neck of the flower so long the honey cell 
was some eleven inches below the opening of the 
flower, he immediately said: "Where that flower 
grew there is a moth, or some insect with proboscis 
eleven inches long that must find that honey cell, and 
so distribute the pollen from its wings and back upon 
the other sex that belongs to this flower." And it 
was said, " Such a moth has never been seen." The 
next invoice of specimens from an exploring expe- 
dition brought the moth with its long, curled-up pro- 
boscis longer than that of the Sphinx moth. It was 
found where the flower grew. Asa Gray was a 
prophet because he knew that God made nothing in 
vain in the world, that He never trifled with a flower. 
He understood, as Tennyson understood, that 

" Not a moth with vain desire 
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire 
Or but subserves another's gain." 

In the foundation of things there shall be included 
all kinds of cause that we perceive as effects in the 
world. For instance, you cannot have a living world 
from a dead cause. You cannot have an intelligent 
world from a dumb source. You cannot have a world 
of mind without any mother-mind from which it is 
born. You cannot have that supreme flower of human 



H /IDessage for Hi! Souls 13 

life, Jesus of Nazareth, except by a process of incar- 
nation, by which the active intelligence of the real be- 
ing of God appeared in the flesh, according to the pas- 
sage from John's Gospel, " The Word was made flesh 
and dwelt among us." The philosophic atheist may 
say, " I live in a world of effects, but I will cut the 
connection between the effect and the cause and the 
world will go on just the same." But that would 
not be an ordered world; and that is not an ordered 
mind that so regards it. 

The Sense of Purpose in every Scene of the Natural 
World 

WE live in the world of effects; we are part of 
the effect. First among the effects, is unques- 
tionably the " rule of mind." You stand before a Jac- 
quard loom, and it seems as though it moved of itself. 
You watch the curious process of the weaving 
going on, and presently a little shuttle falls down 
into its place with a new line of color, and runs 
between the meshes, as though it had been sent 
by some intelligence that lay behind and out of 
sight. Hanging above the loom is the pattern of that 
thing which is to be, that is a picture in the mind 
that made it, as the loom itself is the product of a 
mind that made it. And so through the whole uni- 
verse, you cannot conceive of accidents so regular, 
you cannot conceive of order without its being 
ordered. The sense of will, of design, of movement, 
of purpose, is in every scene of the natural world. 



14 H /iftessape for Ell Souls 

Inexorable Law can not be Evaded 

WE have learned that in the universe there is no 
room for two beings who might divide the em- 
pire between them, — God and some diabolical antith- 
esis of God. We have learned that no atonement can 
be invoked which can impute to a man a righteousness 
which is not his own ; that no atonement can be con- 
ceived which would relieve a man of the effects of a 
sin that he had committed; and that just as truly 
as when you cut through the true skin you leave a 
scar, just so truly the thing done by the soul, in the 
soul, against the law of God, never is healed. There 
is no atonement that can take out of the world the 
evil thing that we have put into it: we have learned 
that and bow down penitent before inexorable law. 



Uniting to Make the World Better 

TIT EN can do business together who are on dia- 
-*J-L metrically opposite sides politically and re- 
ligiously. Why can they not save the world together, 
without reference to their political or religious party ? 
I should say that the life of Jesus reproduced in the 
world is the one thing on which we might unite; to 
live His life again; to feel His temper and spirit; 
to love (for love in all the worlds must be better than 
hate) to love the world back into the heart of God. 
We can do that, and we are bound to do it if we mean 
to realize Christian unity. So we will offer our his- 
toric criticisms on historic grounds ; our biblical crit- 



H /IDessage for Hii Souls 15 

icisms upon grounds biblical, our doctrinal criticisms 
upon grounds doctrinal, but when it comes to the 
heart of man and the character of the individual, we 
will unite in righteous work for the sake of making 
the world better, not requiring uniformity of opinion 
in order to have unity of fellowship. 

Citizenship the Highest Fwnction 

THERE is no higher function than that of citizen- 
ship. Society is the divinest thing we have ; and 
the business of him who knows the way is to lead in 
the paths of righteousness those of the social state 
who need his guidance. The difference between the 
citizen and the adventurer, between the man who 
desires gain and who desires to give, between the sane 
and steady worker for the common weal, and the in- 
vader of the commonwealth, lies in this ; that the one 
desires to take out of the country all fhat he can get, 
and the other desires to put into the country all that 
he can give. It is the challenge to our Americanism 
to bestow ourselves upon the affairs of government, 
to find nothing ignoble that concerns the Nation, and 
to have a passion for righteousness that shall in one 
aspect take the name of patriotism, as in another, 
it takes the name of civic virtue. 



Nationality is Personality 



A 



N ordered herd can never be a commonwealth ; for 
national life has common weal for its desire, co- 



16 a /fDessacje for HIl Soul3 

operation for its endeavor, patriotism for its creed, 
loyalty for its communion ; and writes over the altars 
of its sacrifice, " Here we lay our lives, our fortunes, 
and our sacred honor." The personality of national 
life forbids monarchy as its final form and stamps 
anarchy as its relentless foe : it is the merging of the 
individual in the national person. Nationality is per- 
sonality. It speaks a language which all civilized 
peoples can understand. It denounces in terms of 
death those who are traitors to its own ideals, not 
6imply because they have betrayed their trust but 
because they have exalted the individual will above 
the common good. 



The Lover of His Kind 

TAKE the man who believes profoundly in his 
fellows. He believes in the " essential dignity 
of human nature." He believes in " the sovereignty 
of the human mind." He believes in the capacity of 
human nature for all good. He does not believe in 
man as " ruined," but as incomplete : he believes that 
man rises by continual ascent in a way that discounts 
and contradicts the old doctrine of the " fall of man." 
Man never fell. He has been rising ever since the 
beginning. This man believes in his fellows. We 
call him a lover of his kind and he loves them so 
much that he is not particular that they shall be just 
his kind. He is an example of the exercise of faith 
in an object that is worthy of its bestowal. 



H /iDessage for HIl Souls 17 

The Essential Morality of the Universe 

THE business world is built up, with all its defects, 
with all its want of commercial integrity, as we 
sometimes see it, — it is built up upon the abiding 
conviction that morality is an essential part of human 
life. Yesterday the business world did ninety-five 
per cent, of its work upon credit. If you were to call 
back the whole business of the world to a cash basis, 
because you disbelieved in common integrity, you 
would destroy the commerce of this country before the 
year was out. It is because human nature is essentially 
dependable ; because the universe is essentially moral ; 
because the vast majority of people are really honest, 
that the great mass of business in the world every day 
of the world's life is done upon a system of credit. 

The common belief in the integrity of man must 
be carried through and applied to the universe at 
large. The universe is man's home. If a man is 
essentially honest, if he is essentially right, the uni- 
verse must be of the same kind. I believe that the 
only solution of life is on the basis that the universe 
from core to rim, from center to circumference, is 
moral through and through. In school life, we 
learned the axiom : " A straight line is the shortest 
distance between two points." It is just as true in 
morals. " The whole cannot be greater than the 
sum of all its parts." It is just the same in morals. 
These axioms that are the foundation of geometry are 
also axiomatic in the moral world. Directness of 
intention, sincerity that is crystalline — these are 



18 H message for HIl Soiils 



qualities a man must have in a universe he believes 
to be moral. 

Proportioned Thinking 

YOU cannot believe anything that is worth believ- 
ing which has to do with character until you 
have purged your mind of all cant. Never say the 
thing that you do not believe. Never think the thing 
that you cannot summon before the bar of reason 
and adjudge its place and value. Take no attitude 
toward the great realities for another mind that you 
would not assume for yourself. Take no attitude for 
yourself that you would not be willing to be found in 
if God should call you that moment to your account. 
You say these are high qualities. They are not too 
lofty for a man to claim for himself. Proportioned 
thinking, giving to every phase of life and character 
its due proportion, is accompanied by crystalline sin- 
cerity. 

The Keynote of Christianity 

FT1HIS is the keynote of Christianity — that it 
-*- finds its ground of being in God. It is a divine 
impulse from the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the 
Hebrew, which finds its source in God's unity, its 
expansion in man's brotherhood, its inspiration in 
man's relation to God, and its mission in revealing 
the Father to His children who "ignorantly wor- 
ship " Him. The Greek Aryan with his " gods many 
and lords many" was to find in the unity of God 



H /IDessage for HIl Souls 19 

the ultimate fact of his philosophy and the justi- 
fication of his ethics. The conversion of the world 
to Christ was an effort to reduce the confusion of the 
Aryan Pantheon to unity of worship in the religion 
of Jesus. The Scriptures of the new faith were 
Jewish. The philosophy of life, at once simple and 
strong, was the conception of a Galilean. 

The Ordered World the Procession of God's Life 

IN the aspect of God as personal and immediate, the 
ordered world is the procession of His life. Law 
is the gradual assertion of that normal order in 
morals which finds its archetypal pattern in eternal 
justice. Sin is the attempt to establish in terms of 
will a contradiction to the will eternal. It can never 
be, and the pain and anguish are like ugliness; it 
is " dislocation from the life of God." They there- 
fore are doing the will of God who declare against 
sickness and deformity and hideousness of all kinds ; 
for the mind that has "thought the universe 
through " has thought it through in terms of beauty. 
They also are striving for the same end who declare 
against envy, and hatred, and lust. 

Emancipation of Thought not Dangerous 

THE emancipation of thought belongs to our er- 
rand. We are free to do our own thinking on 
our own terms to our own end. The answer to the 
question : " Is not that a dangerous process ? " is that 



20 H /SDessage tor Hll Souls 

there is no other function of human nature that is 
made dangerous by fit exercise. You use your muscles 
and they grow tough. You use the eye with good 
judgment and its sight improves ; and the ear can be 
trained almost to the acuteness of a dog's hearing. 
Why should it be dangerous to think ? The emanci- 
pation of thought is the only condition on which a 
man may find God. If he is not free, he will find 
the other man's God, and will be restless under the 
leading and feel that the God he finds is alien to his 
nature. 



The Helps to Growth 

PEOPLE whose faces have glowed with the sunset 
do not thereafter sit at northern windows to see it. 
It does not shine there, except by the vaguest and 
most indirect reflection and afterglow upon the sky. 
So when Jacob (to follow the folk-story of the Old 
Testament) was in direst need, he remembered 
the trip he made when he was fleeing before the face 
of his brother and came to the place that he had called 
"Bethel/' where he had his vision and found "the 
house of God/' and he said, " I will go again 
unto Bethel where my altar was at the first." This 
is a good plan. There is something even in the cold 
ashes of that altar, something in the old stones laid 
there, that brings the vision again which spontane- 
ously there appeared. These memories are the helps 
to growth and there is a whole class of people that 
need them as they need food. 



H /IDesaage for Hil Souls 21 

Baptism an Act of Consecration 

rFHEEE can be no regenerative quality in Baptism. 
J- You cannot make a clean heart by an applica- 
tion of water to head or body. There is, however, a 
sense of committal, an act of consecration, which the 
pure spirit of Jesus himself did not disdain. When 
they came to John for baptism He came also, and went 
down into the water and said : " It is becoming that 
we should fulfil all righteousness " ; and there, 
among the confessing sinners, He received the rite 
which meant to them the repentance of sin, and to 
Him a delivery of Himself in consecration unto the 
work of God. So the act of baptism has a meaning. 
It is an act of consecration, and its regenerative 
help to growth comes by the act of the soul in the 
reception of it. 



Seeking the Divine Atmosphere 

CAN" sit in a stifling room and think of the crystal- 
-»- line clearness that rests upon the mountain tops. 
But I am in the stifling room and all that I get out 
of it is a pained imagination of something I want 
and have not. In other words, to put myself into 
relation with the atmosphere, 1 must go where the 
clean air is. I must leave my crowded tenement if 
I can. I must bathe myself, immerse myself, plunge 
into the deeps of air, and have all the functions re- 
lated to it. This is an exact illustration of what 
happens to the man who is walled up in his own selfish 



22 H flDessage for HU Soulg 

claims and theories of what God could do for him if 
God were willing. He is in an asphyxiating selfish- 
ness, pressed upon by the murk and fog of his own 
near desires ; and he gets down and wrestles to make 
God willing to help him to have the clear atmosphere 
of the divine life, instead of leaving his own cabined 
life for the wide spaces of the life of God. 

Our Unused Assets 

IF religion is a natural function of the human 
soul ; if you cannot " get religion " in the old 
evangelistic phrase, but cannot by any possibility get 
rid of it; if it flows with your blood; if it pulsates 
in your heart; if it quivers with the motion of the 
atoms of the brain; if it is in the very tissues that 
go to make up your being, — if this is true, then it 
behooves you to find out the terms on which you can 
realize on it. Why should we have a lot of dead assets 
which we will never put into circulation in the traffic 
of the world ? We are like people who are land-poor, 
who have immense estates and cannot pay the taxes. 
This is the condition of the man who is living a 
purely material life. He is not realizing on his invest- 
ment in any sense. 

The Challenge of the Desert Places 

TIT EN thought God had forgotten the Great Ameri- 
-^-*- can Desert that stretches for six hundred miles 
across this country, because He only made buffalo- 



H flDessage tor Bll Souls 23 

grass grow on it for a little while, together with a 
few short-lived flowers. And they said : " God hardly 
cares for the great herds that graze a little while 
and then move on." Then men found out that God 
wanted to prompt us to redeem the desert waste, 
to pour water over the desert, to make great irrigating 
canals. All that God meant by the desert was to 
challenge man to make it blossom and be fruitful; 
and when He was able to get men of intelligence and 
skill enough to make great irrigating canals, it was 
found good soil in which to grow anything the climate 
would support. Find out, then, some tract of human 
life that looks arid and desert and unfruitful and 
there be a worker together with God. 



The Eevealer of the Absolute 

"1VTO man has seen God at any time" because no 
-L * man has seen Ultimate Eeality at any time. 
When the sun sinks through the denser air, you see 
the red disk. That is not the sun, it is the photo- 
sphere on our atmosphere. No man has seen any 
ultimate reality, but the business of life is to have 
the ultimate reality interpret itself in terms level 
to our need and within our capacity. God is 
an infinite number of things that I do not 
know; but what I want to know is what the 
words "good," "righteous," "loving," mean and 
what to be good and to be loving means in the ulti- 
mate reality. In Jesus we say we have the terms in 
which our human life measures the capacity of man 



24 H /IDessage tor HU Souls 

to know God. He was the revealer of God to man, 
standing as the expression of the absolute in terms 
of humanity. 

Man has not " Fallen " hut Risen 

WE deny the theory of the " fall of man " because 
we find no proof of it in Nature. Think of 
this inverted pyramid, and the whole structure of 
the Christian religion resting on the conception of 
the total depravity of the race, a theory which cannot 
be maintained in the face of the elementary study 
of anthropology. Jesus talked to human beings as 
though they were capable of all good things. Take 
his conversation with the woman of Samaria. Here 
was a woman come to draw water out of an ancient 
well, a woman to whom the sacred things of life had 
become a trade, and the sanctities of the spirit, a 
commonplace. To this woman, so impure, Jesus 
spoke of the spirituality of worship, the fatherhood 
of God, the universality of religion. After reading 
that, can one believe in the depravity of human 
nature ? How can we deal with the " fall of man " 
as fundamental to constructive theology? It is im- 
possible. 

Pride which Follows Achievement is Legitimate 

rPHE criticism of one form of faith by another 
■*■ often has its root in denominational pride. I 
can understand anybody's being proud of what has 



H Message for UU Soulg 25 

been achieved. We ride with Paul Eevere because he 
dared, and stand with "the embattled farmers" at 
Lexington because they dared. We review the great 
periods of our national history, because something 
was done, something achieved. We take up the 
autobiography of Booker Washington and follow the 
boy from his almost unknown beginning until he 
becomes the most useful man of his race in America, 
because of what he did, what he accomplished. But 
why should anybody get excited about a table of 
statistics ? Not numbers, nor institutions, nor popu- 
larity, nor fashionable adherents, nor anything else 
counts, but simply ability to swing the weapon and 
cut your way through. 

The Necessity for Spiritual Conviction 

A REALLY constructive theology cannot be satis- 
-*■*• fied with what is practically untrue under the 
light of modern criticism. What is traditionally 
true must be examined under the light of history; 
what is authoritatively true may be philosophically 
necessary; but it is still upon the plane of intellectual 
speculation and is not yet in the field of religion. 
There is a deep below all speculative reasoning 
which every man must reach in his personal think- 
ing, in his spiritual convictions, if he is to be satis- 
fied. His truth must be theologically true if it may, 
philosophically true if it must, but it must be spirit- 
ually efficient. The theology that does not make you 
a better man or woman has not done anything for you. 



26 H /i&essage for HU Souls 

Paul is quite right when he tells us that " knowledge 
puffeth up, but love buildeth up." 

We Pay our own Penalties 

WE stand by the order of Nature, and Nature 
does not allow us to put our sins on anybody 
else. You charge your sickness to the drainage; but 
you have to take your own medicine — you do not 
pour it down the drain. You say, " I was hurt by 
the blunder of the motorman"; but it is not the 
motorman's legs that are put in splints. We do our 
own bookkeeping and balance our debit and credit 
as the days go by. In the Old Testament we read: 
" I say unto you that all souls are mine. As the soul 
of the father, so the soul of the son is mine, and the 
soul that sinneth, it shall die." This is the teaching 
not of the Old Testament alone, but of the New Tes- 
tament as well. 



Zbe Cburcb 



The soul is artesian cmd the Church is the channel 
for its flood. 



H /IDessage lot HU Souls 29 



PRAYER OF THANKFULNESS 

OGOD, we turn in this quiet hour and pray to be 
shut in with Thee, knowing this to be but an 
incident in all the day's doing and thinking, and 
feeling that it is a holy moment, that it may be 
made holy by the spirit's consecration, a consecra- 
tion by divine communion, and that we shall go 
forth as those that have been refreshed, steadied, 
quieted, and strengthened with the touch of the 
divine hand, and that we shall be guarded anew 
for what we call our common duties; and that we 
shall find new inspiration in our ordinary tasks. 

We thank Thee for the manifold mercies of 
Providence, — we offer Thee our unfeigned thanks, 
and the sacrifice of our praise. We claim our 
rights in Thee for what Thou dost for us, for when 
we have asked, Thou hast done more than we have 
asked. Thou hast remembered things that we had 
forgotten, and thought of things we would never 
have known ; for Thou knowest us altogether. We 
were dust in Thy hand before our lives were 
formed; the breath we breathe is Thy breath; and 
since we belong to Thee, help us with the things 
of our common life. 

God, we thank Thee for every holy influence 
that made our childhood happy, for every divine 
inspiration that from other hearts reached our own. 
We thank Thee that we were taught to pray to 
Thee, wondering whether the eyes that looked 



30 H /iftessage for HII Souls 

down into ours were looked through by the Father 
in Heaven. And we thank Thee for all the sweet 
influences of home, and the church, and the scrip- 
ture, and the goodness of the world. We adore 
Thee this hour. Lead us we pray Thee now that 
we go alone, self-directed, lead us no less than in 
that early time. 

Give us the power to love men and women into 
goodness, to be compassionate with a compassion 
like Thine own, to feel deeply the sorrows of the 
world; that the walls of life may be broken down 
and the light of sympathy flow forth. 

Overshadow our land with Thy goodness; teach 
and strengthen the hands of those that rule, and 
give righteousness to those upon whom responsibil- 
ity falls; and make this land not only the refuge 
of the poor, but the sanctuary of the oppressed. 

Hear us in Thy mercy and give us Thy peace. 
Amen. 



H /iDessaoe for Hll Souls 3i 

Our Accidental Affiliations 

MOST people drop into their denominations at 
their birth, and are so much taken up with the 
more interesting world that, for the most part, they 
are contented to stay where their birth deposited 
them. They are taught certain things that are true 
to those who stand to them as ideals of character, and 
they say these things must be true because such lives 
have proved them true. There are other people who 
because of temperament are dependent upon author- 
ity, and still other people constitutionally dependent 
on guidance. There are those who are built upon 
the Moslem types, and they find their expression in 
Christianity as Calvinists. On the other hand there 
are natures that must deal with the ultimate reason 
for their opinion. They are the rationalists. People 
are in different churches for divers reasons. 

The Spirit of Hate Cannot Remain 

READ that splendid declaration of the omni- 
presence of God, in the one hundred and thirty- 
ninth Psalm, the high- water mark of Hebrew poetry : 

u If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there : 

If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; 

Even there shall Thy hand lead me, 

And Thy right hand shall hold me." 

In the one hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm, read : 



32 a /IDessage for HU Souls 

" Happy shall he be, that taketh 

And dasheth thy little ones against the stones." 

With careful analysis and the passage of the scalpel 
between the texts, with careful inquiry into the 
origin of the texts and the conditions under which 
they were written, we now know that one was the 
inspired utterance of the spirit of God and the other 
the inspired hate of all that opposed the Jew. One 
is the holy spirit of the Scripture, the other is as 
evanescent as all hate must be. The battle of the 
churches is dismissed in the interest of the pure gold 
which is the Word of God. 

What the Church Means 

IF there could go out today, from this place of 
prayer, one human soul upon whose mind there 
had dawned the idea that no amount of phraseology 
was of any avail, that no amount of profession was of 
any avail, but that there had been established between 
the great source of life in God and that soul a con- 
nection that made him thrill with the sense of that 
relationship, it would be worth all you could pay to 
try the experiment another Sunday. That is what 
the church is for. That is what it means or it does 
not mean anything. It is to help to bring about that 
marvellous thing which happens when the life of God 
becomes one with the soul of man. If the news that 
religion brings is good news, it must be good news 
of a relationship, or at least, a relation that I can 
establish with the ultimate reality. 



H Message for HII Souls 33 

Spiritual Sympathy 

WHEN in the midst of the antagonism of the 
churches, there is discovered a church which 
welcomes the spirit of the time, which is loyal to the 
discoveries of modern science, which asks only " Is it 
true ? " and never " Is it venerable ? " — when such 
a body of people says to the Catholic, or to the Jew 
or any evangelical minister, " Speak here in this 
pulpit the thing you know concerning God and the 
soul," something must be learned of that higher 
sense of spiritual affinity and the life of the soul that 
binds people together. To be a member of such a 
church, a man has only to be sincere and a seeker of 
the truth. He cannot be a wilful sinner if he loves 
truth and goodness. 

What Religion Is 

THE effort to make people say the same thing 
whether they understand it or not, divides the 
churches, because what is one man's meat is another 
man's poison, and what is one man's creed is another 
man's anathema. The heresy which has nothing to 
recommend it is this; that accuracy of statement, 
uniformity of opinion, clearness of definition, — that 
this constitutes religion. It never did and it never 
will! Religion is a passionate devotion to the will 
of God. The Christian religion is a passionate de- 
votion to the 'will of God, as Jesus revealed God to 
men. It is for you to decide whether the ethics of 
Jeeus will suffice for the administration of life. If 



* H ZlBessage for HU Souls 



you are Christians and you want to serve the cause 
of Christian unity, then adopt the simplest possible 
statement of purpose and forego any effort to har- 
monize opinion. 

Independence a Necessity 

THEEE are people who, if you gave them their 
choice, would sincerely declare that they would 
rather worship God all by themselves, on a basis that 
no other human being would accept, than to be 
dominated by any other human being in the world. 
That is the kind of thing that made the American 
Eevolution as distinguished from " the divine right 
of kings," and it is the kind of thing that makes a 
nation, if you get enough of such people together. 
It is the kind of thing that makes a church, — in- 
dependence of temperament, by conviction, by habit 
of thought, by the study of history, by the very rights 
of devotion by which a man wants to say his own 
prayers to his own God and have it out, sin and all, 
with heaven. You can no more dispose of his re- 
sponsibility than he can escape the sense of his sin. 
For this reason, uniformity of Christianity will 
never prevail. 

The Right Tone 

I BELIEVE in the church as an assemblage of 
people given over to an earnest devotion to the 
will of God, not an assemblage of people whom you 
can designate by the badge they wear or the phrase 



H /IDessage for HU Souls 35 

they use. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, among 
the splendid passages that are written concerning the 
soul as it goes up to be weighed and passed on 
into the Courts of the Blessed — this significant thing 
is added to all the other virtues : " He hath the right 
tone! 9 It means that he could say the holy things 
in the holy way. This has gone out of use except in 
rare and isolated instances. There is only one tone 
for character and for religion together. Many a man 
of supreme faith has never been a " professor of relig- 
ion" in the usual sense of the word. He is not 
therefore to be dismissed without investigation as to 
whether or not he is really a believer. 

Life is the Test 

THE church never was so weak in its hold upon the 
common people as it is today, because the 
church has been built upon a speculation about Christ 
and not upon a vindication and realization of His 
life. This is the radical defect of the church. Over 
and over again, it must be insisted that religion is 
not its definition. Eeligious experience is therefore 
not its theological or doctrinal statement, a distinc- 
tion that must be maintained in a most insistent 
way. The churches have been created by doctrine, 
while lives are only built up by life. Therefore the 
church declines, and life bourgeons evermore in ful- 
ness, richness and power. The problem set every 
Christian is to get back in terms of rmmanness the 
life of Jesus Christ 



36 H flftessaoe for HU Souls 

The Need of Religious Services 

WE encounter people, who, with regard to the 
attendance upon church service, say that it is 
no longer necessary to them ; that they are " free 
souls n ; that they have been " delivered from cus- 
tom." They mean that what was His " custom n 
whose name they bear — the name of Christ — 
they do not need. If that be so, let them give them- 
selves to others who do need it, who have not grown 
so great, who have not reached such spiritual propor- 
tions. One class of people really need the discipline, 
instruction, training and routine observance of the 
usages of religion because they are still in their 
pupilage. For them a great grip of the soul is re- 
quired to hold on to the sense of spiritual realities. 
Even to those " liberated " souls there can never come 
the time when they shall not desire to minister to the 
next man who needs them. 

The Only Heresy 

THE simple religion which transfigured the life 
of Israel's last great Prophet and from that 
pure Heart of boundless benevolence flowed out to 
bless the world, — this stream of pure affection sank 
as a desert stream in the sand. The stream was lost 
for ages underground, reappearing at intervals as a 
spring to flow for a little while, but lost again in 
subtilties of speculation or impurities of life. Secu- 
lar history calls the ages beginning with the sixth 
century " dark." But the history of the church closes 



H /IDessage tor HU Souls 37 

its short day before the light declines upon the 
imperial countenance of Constantine. The only 
heresy which has nothing to recommend it, soon 
became universal — the heresy which declares that 
intellectual accuracy is the condition of salvation, 
and a formula of belief, the guarantee of religion. 

The Church the Flower of Civilization 

THE church, then, is needed, not as attendant 
upon civilization, but as civilization's flower; 
for it gives the opportunity for such personal sacri- 
fice, such education of the soul to its highest tasks, 
as may be worthy of most serious study. The free 
church has a great ideal, which is no less than the 
perfection of the individual that he may serve the 
perfection of the whole. Its open doors should be as 
hospitable as the summer; its worship should be en- 
kindled from on high; its service might be reduced 
to any simplicity without losing its dignity; and its 
people, by the very fact of their presence there in the 
holy hour, should be like sensitized plates waiting 
for the penciled ray of the Divine to make the 
picture of holiness upon their minds. 

The Place of Worship 

AS each week goes by with the discouragements 
that come into it, turn to the place of worship, 
as Jesus in His discouragement remembered that 
place where the heavens were opened to Him. Learn 
to abandon yourselves to God; to let yourselves go 



38 H flDessaoe for Hil Souls 

upon life's tide with small care of what becomes of 
you ; and so gird yourselves in every hour of worship 
that you shall be strong enough, not only for the 
tasks that are your own, but strong enough also for 
the burdens that are not your own. Come to the 
church out of life's perplexities, out of life's discour- 
agements, out of the strenuous days which tax your 
endeavor, — come to dedicate yourself unto the will of 
God, being sure that nothing is of much account but 
that the soul shall find itself at home in the presence 
of the Eternal, who is its life. 



The Supreme Purpose of the Church 

THE one supreme purpose of the church is the 
spiritual renewal of its people. It is neither an 
entertainment nor meant merely to be the source of 
information. The one purpose of the church and its 
greatest function to sincere religion, is that you may 
get out of yourselves into the higher realm of the 
spiritual life for which you pine. Inspiration is its 
end and almost its sole end; so that the man who 
comes in from the contact of the week's work, feeling 
that his very mouth tastes of dust, and that he has 
been harried beyond endurance, may shear the whole 
matter away and see how small the environment of 
his life appears in the presence of the great things of 
eternity. He shall go away, feeling that the cares, 
which he calls his business, have no comparison in 
importance with his one business — the growing of 
a human soul. 



H /IDessase tor Hll Souls 39 

The Church an Organism 

"OOCIETY is an organism in which every cell 
rJ has consciousness " ; that is, the health of the 
whole depends upon the health of each individual cell. 
So the church is not a mechanical device for saving 
your soul ; it is an organism, a normal part of society 
for saving by its organic power something not yet 
sound. The church exists for the community in 
which it lives, and never for itself. Every church, 
having placed itself on record as standing for certain 
ideals, owes to the community that all its efforts 
shall be spent upon the betterment of that community 
which has given it ground for being. Unless the 
need of the world's betterment at its very doors 
leads it to go out to a service greater than that which 
occupies it within its walls, it has lost the opportunity 
for its highest life. 

" Ash and Ye Shall Receive " 

YOU take away from the service of religion exactly 
what you bring. The docile spirit goes away 
instructed. The hungry soul goes away satisfied. 
The prayerful spirit finds God, and does not know 
much of anything beside. It ought to be impossible 
for any minister of religion, by any mischance or 
failure of his own, to spoil the service of religion for 
any profoundly spiritual nature. We take away what 
we bring. If we come thinking we are full, we shall 
go away unsatisfied, and lay the blame at some other's 
door. 



40 H flDessage for HU Souls 

"Seek and Ye Shall Find" 

I CANNOT conceive of a more useless effort than 
that we should come into the church and go 
through with an exercise of religious nature that has 
not even the value of a calisthenic unless accompanied 
by more than a mental athletic, more than a range of 
emotions. Unless we go forth ready as expectant 
souls, as voyagers search the horizon for a sail, or 
wonder when the land will loom over the deeps on 
which they are travelling, — unless we go out in that 
attitude of mind, little has been accomplished. 



Gbe power of jfaitb 



Faith does not consist in agreeing to propositions but 
in reposing in confidence and love. 



H Message for Hii Souls 43 



PRAYER FOR SELF-SURRENDER 

THY children seek Thee, Father, not praying 
Thee to come near, but praying that they 
may be able to bridge all the distance of their 
souls' variant from Thine, and their wishes that 
are not according to Thy will, and come near to 
Thee who art always waiting, and who dost not 
turn away any that come to Thee. God, who 
needest never to be persuaded, persuade us by 
Thy spirit to be wholly Thine* Let the thought of 
consecration to Thy will have taken from it all 
the things that hurt and are hard to endure, and 
become the pure delight of the souls that seek 
Thee: so that to be Thine by the act of our will 
shall be as real to us as that we are Thine by 
the creation of Thy hand. May nothing seem so 
natural to us as to seek Thee: may nothing seem 
so full of joy as to know that Thou art God. We 
pray Thee enlighten our eyes that we may see the 
truth, and open our hearts to its reception, and 
give us such devotion to the will of God that it 
shall become our constant joy. Amen. 



44 h /iDessage for HU Souls 

Facts versus Definitions 

CAELYLE quotes with approval the bitter proverb, 
"Thou wouldst do little for God if the devil 
were dead/' But, the devil is dead. Are there few 
that serve God ? We answer : The Age is profoundly 
religious, though it has repudiated a trembling timid- 
ity, and declares for the soul's right to know God 
unhindered by any fear. It matters nothing to the 
aspect of the sunrise and its day, and nothing to the 
quiet evening with its stars that Copernicus reversed 
the procession of the planetary system, and plucked 
the still earth from the center and set it spinning on 
the levels of the lighted paths which now it must 
obediently follow. Men still look eastward from the 
lamp which lights them to their labor. The facts 
remain when all their definitions change. 



God the Power of the Universe 

rTlHE water of the Great Lakes pours itself in the 
J- rapids of Niagara and flings itself down from 
its height to the great depth below. One-tenth of 
one per cent, of it has been taken out and passed 
through the mighty trench, and then is poured out 
into the river below the Falls. Practically none of 
it is lost. What happens in the process? Great 
factories spin with all their machinery. Twenty 
miles away, street-cars are bringing in their freight 
of human lives, propelled by this power. The dyna- 
mos have generated the electricity. They have been 



H Message for Hll Souls 45 

moved by the turbines in the trench of the great 
duct through which the water has been led. Sever 
the connection between the first turbine and the first 
dynamo, and all is darkness, all traffic stops, all 
machinery stands still; the translation of the power 
of the floods from power to light, from power to 
motion, from power to manufactured products, is at 
an end. It is just as easy to imagine the impossibility 
of a world of being without Being at its base, as to 
imagine a world of light without power to kindle it. 



Desire and Supply 

THE world is so ordained that there never yet has 
been discovered a persistent desire native to 
human life, instinct in human life, permanently 
expressed in human life, but that it was the registry, 
not simply of a desire that would be fed, but of a 
supply that was bound to appear. The botanist takes 
up the flower, and knows by its very construction the 
kind of insect that is engaged in its propagation, the 
distribution of its pollen. The naturalist takes a 
single bone or a single tooth and constructs in imag- 
ination the creature and its habitat. God never flung 
a flag out yet and called it desire, that was not placed 
over a cairn where He had cached for some explorer in 
the world a reservoir of supply. The gravitations of 
life are not accidental, but intentional. Their pull 
is toward the center of the planet to which they 
belong. 



46 H Message for Hll Souls 

The Attitude of Faith 

' 'T^AITH " is a much misunderstood word. It is 
■*- supposed to be the prerogative of those who 
"get religion." You can not get religion; you can 
not get rid of it. It is in the fibre of your nature; 
it is part of your tissue; it is woven, interwoven, and 
completely involved with the whole structure of the 
human mind. Religion is a function of the human 
soul; faith is the exercise of that function. The New 
Testament declares that " faith is the substance of 
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." 
A modern man has given this definition : " Faith is 
the conviction that in the universe there is something 
that corresponds to my best." That is the attitude of 
faith. When I am at my best, the universe and I 
are in intimate correspondence. 

The Appeal of Faith 

THE man of faith believes profoundly in that 
Ultimate Eeality which in moments of divine 
communion he calls the Great Companion and in 
moments of reverie seems to him the very palpitating 
heart of the universe itself. He is a believer in God. 
If the saint has his idea of God, and the savage his 
symbol, that is not a question of religion, but of 
development. In all the world no human being, from 
the most developed saint of any creed, or kind, or 
religion, down to the creature who bowing down 
before stock or stone worships there, was ever left 
unheard by the Being who made him. 



H flftessage for HU Souls 47 

The Faith that is in You 

THE first business of the believer is to know what 
he believes. A general vague susceptibility to 
anything that comes our way is not faith: that is 
credulity. No utterly credulous person can be a be- 
liever. A real believer must be an inquirer. He must 
carefully discriminate in terms that make him sure ; 
so that when he has cleaned up his mind, the things 
he holds to, he holds to tenaciously and with a grasp 
that nothing can loosen. The first condition of 
believing in anything is to be sure of it. For that 
reason, we pre-eminently believe in Christ because we 
realize what He was. The first thing to that end is 
to acquaint one's self with the documents that tell 
about His life. 

Faith in the Ultimate Reality 

I HOPE that you have come to be possessed by the 
idea that there is an Ultimate Keality; that we 
are not tied up to phantoms; that we are not an- 
chored to floating bogs; that we do not simply live 
upon the scaffolding of life; that we are not, as we 
say, trying to make the best of things; and that we 
are not condemned to illusion. Emerson said, " We 
must trust the order of Nature so completely as to 
believe that whatever questions the universe prompts 
us to ask, the universe can answer." This splendid 
faith also took this form in the mind of the same 
great writer : " Whatever it is that the great Provi- 
dence has in reserve for us, it must be something 



48 h /iDessage for HU Souls 

beautiful and in the grand style of His work." These 
are the utterances of absolute assurance. 



Love is the Heart of the Universe 

1 ' A ND of which of you that is a father, shall his 
-£*• son ask bread, and he give him a stone? or 
a fish, and he for a fish give him a serpent? If ye 
then being evil, know how to give good gifts unto 
your children, how much more shall your Heavenly 
Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him ? " 
It is a matter for congratulation that no philo- 
sophic insight nor scientific inquiry has yet devised a 
method which more completely meets the needs of 
human life than this simple statement of the terms 
on which we may believe that at the root of all things 
is the eternal goodness, that a heart of love is the 
heart of the universe. 

To recognize all human relationships as only nor- 
mal and healthy when grounded in man's highest 
nature is as true as it is to say that there is no 
earthly measure which can reach the height of that 
heaven in which love dwells. We admit as true that 
a house is not necessarily a home, a brood of children 
is not necessarily a family, united lives are not 
necessarily joined together of God, so long as lust 
can be distinguished from love. It is no less true 
of every other sphere; and the distinguishing glory 
of the work of Christ is that in adjusting human rela- 
tions He put them upon a basis where they can be 
regarded as the earthly reflection of a heavenly fact. 



H Message for HU Souls 49 

The light which shines upon the sea of human life 
is the reflection of all that overarching heaven which 
mirrors itself in the tides of our common life. This 
is the sense in which Jesus said : " What one of you 
that is a father, if his son ask bread, will he give him 
a stone ?" 

The knowing how to give good gifts is based upon 
that native goodness which lives in man in spite of 
the evil with which it is associated. From the field 
of his daily life, he gathers the wheat for those who 
depend upon him, though it may grow among the 
tares of actual sin. How much more, says the 
Teacher, shall a Being on whose purity no fleck or 
spot is found, who can not be God unless He is good, 
who knows with no dimness upon his vision of the 
perfect good, who is " without variableness or shadow 
of turning " — how much more will this perfect good- 
ness exceed the goodness limited, imperfect, and en- 
croached upon by sin, and " give the Holy Spirit to 
them that ask Him." The glory of God is in his 
goodness. 

The Natural Ground of Fatith 

TESTIS stood at the high noon of a spirit divinely 
** clear, and lifted this warning to those whom mid- 
night threatened: "If the light that is in thee be 
darkness, how great is that darkness ! " But, " If 
thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of 
light." It is the tribute of a luminous nature to the 
natural ground in man for the clearest enlightenment. 
It is a warning of One who knows how precious sight 



50 H /Message for Hll Souls 

is toward those whose course may bring blindness. 
It is nature protesting against the unnatural. To 
Jesus, the spiritual life was a part of what is nature's 
realm. He was a lover of nature. He saw the hues 
of the lily and smiled His recognition of how " God 
clothed the grass of the field." His effort, therefore, 
was never to prove God in nature, but on nature to 
build up a perfect confidence concerning God in 
human life: "Will He not much more clothe you, 
ye of little faith?" 

When we come to understand religion, root and 
branch, the soil it grows in, the fruit it bears, its 
deepest roots below, and stretch of tendril above, when 
we know the fragrance of its flowering, then shall we 
recognize, and be comforted and confirmed by the 
recognition, that religion is nature at its best. There 
can be no religion that is vital that is not natural; 
so that when we are at our best, we are nearest God. 
" If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full 
of light." All that the great Teacher seems to be 
pleading for is naturalness unhindered. The thought 
of the naturalness of the light within belongs to 
humanity. It is not brought from without or 
kindled from without; it is only fed from without. 
" The light in thee " is thine own but only because 
the great central sun is thine own also. 

Spiritual Creation is of God 

THEEE is a very profound truth wrapped up in 
that familiar declaration, " We are His work- 
manship." We can bring nothing from the outside 



H /iDessage for HII Souls si 

to God, for He has made these things which we do, 
the result of what we are, and what we are in this 
spiritual creation is of God. Whatever we may 
achieve and inscribe with our name, the Great Work- 
man's name is written over ours. We are but un- 
folding what was long ago enfolded; and when we 
are most ourselves, we are most God's also. When 
fruit hangs ripe on the vineyard slopes of the Rhine, 
we speak not so much of grapes, as of soil and climate 
and careful cultivation, so, when our best fruits 
appear, it is still the fruit of the Spirit. We are 
planted, nourished, tended, and will be gathered at 
last, ourselves the fruit of God's great bounty, — not 
what we can do, but what we can be. It is not ours, 
but us, God claims. 



Two Words in Religion 

THERE must be in the cause everything that is in 
the effect, — a living world from a Living Cause, 
a world of mind from an Infinite Intelligence, a 
world of love, which, when we see full circled, we 
shall know as Browning did, that " All's love, yet all's 
law." The two go together; and it is for that reason 
that when we get through with our analysis, we find 
that there are just two words in religion, " God " and 
"the soul." Our effort continually is to build a 
bridge between these two, to spring an arch over 
from the pier that we call God to the pier that we 
call soul. The effort of religion in its history, ex- 
perience, struggle, means that between God and the 



52 H /Message for Bli Souls 

soul there are relations as between cause and effect; 
and the spirit of man seeks its origin in the Eternal 
Spirit. 

Modem Faith Content with Symbols 

ONE of the pitiful things about modern faith is 
that it hangs on the garment of Christ instead of 
embracing the Lord Himself ; that it hovers about an 
empty grave, contented with the poetry of religion, 
when religion's self is capable of creating new poetry 
and new scriptures, if it be vital enough. We are 
sustained by the poetry of religion as its legitimate 
adornment; we are filled with the vision of its 
beauty; but the old poem repeated is not worth so 
much as one fluent line of the soul's communicated 
beauty in a new poem of the spiritual life. Our 
business is not to recite the legends of the past but 
to create the psalms of the present. The new watch- 
word of religion is Love; its new expression is Life. 

The Supreme Acknowledgment of Jesus 

JESUS said: I am a Voice, I am a Messenger, I 
am a Light, I am anything approximate, nothing 
ultimate. So if you would know whether what I 
have been saying is part of the mind of God, fits into 
the divine order, do not ask Me how I got it. If any 
man will do God's will, as I am doing it, he shall 
know of the teaching whether it is of God or whether 
I have spoken of Myself. It is the temptation of 



H /iDessage for HU Semis 53 

all splendid intelligences to say something on their 
own account. But it is the supreme offering of the 
highest intelligence and the most exalted conscious- 
ness to refer all that it is to the spring from which it 
flows, and say, " I am only the conduit ; I am the 
conveyor ; I am as nothing to the original source." 

Triumph of the Faithful Soul 

THEEE are not battalions enough yet recruited 
for the army of sorrow to hold permanently a 
faithful soul to the dust. The " rush " passes over 
him and he pulls himself together and readjusts his 
strength. Or when the slower moving care surrounds 
him like a night, that slowly descends upon his path, 
he waits until the day shall dawn. He knows " it is 
always morning somewhere in the world." Perhaps 
the song that he will sing when his new day arises, 
will be this: 

"Dear Lord, since Thou didst make the earth, 
Thou mad'st it not for grief, but mirth: 

Therefore will I be glad 

And let who will be sad. 
Lord, as 'tis Thine eternal state 
With joy undimmed to contemplate 

The world that Thou hast wrought 

As mirror of Thy thought, 
So every morning, I will rise 
And effer thee for sacrifice 

A spirit bright and clear 

As the wide atmosphere. 
For, Lord, since all is well with Thee, 
It can not well be ill with me." 



54 H Message for Hll Souls 

Faith in the Unseen 

IN the story of Thomas and his disbelief like a 
challenge comes that splendid statement of 
Jesus: "Keach hither thy finger and behold my 
hands, and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into 
My side, and be not faithless, but believing." When 
Thomas is convinced that he actually sees the Man 
with whom he had walked the ways of Galilee, there 
follows the statement : " Because thou hast seen Me, 
thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not 
seen and yet have believed." Blessed are you who 
in this maelstrom of commercial activity, must be- 
lieve, though you have not seen. Believe what? 
What Jesus was trying to prove to Thomas, that the 
real being is not of the body but of the spirit; that 
personality inheres not in the flesh but in the relation- 
ships of life; the whole bearing of the story is to 
put a premium upon being sure, but the avenue of 
sureness is spiritual apprehension, not simply physi- 
cal touch. 



There is Nothing Alone in the World 

WHEN" Jesus said to his disciples, "I will not 
leave you orphaned. I will come to you. I will 
send another Helper who shall be with you forever," 
we regard the statement as the utterance of a spiritual 
truth. It is the utterance of an absolute scientific 
fact that no child of God need ever in all the world 
feel that he is lost sight of or alone. From least to 



H ZlDessaQe for Hll Souls 55 

greatest, from most minute to nearly infinite, there 
is nothing that is alone. That is the guarantee that 
God and you belong together — the Source and its 
outcome; the Cause and its effect; the Creator and 
the creature; the Infinite and what you vainly call 
yourselves, " finite," who are not finite, but only the 
infinite under finite conditions. All these are woven 
into the body of life together. That God and the 
soul belong together is not only true but it may be 
consciously true. 

Faith is a Natural Faculty 

THE sum of our beliefs is not the weight of our 
convictions. Our guesses at Truth steady the 
mind by fixing the attention but they can never be 
substituted for the assured conviction by which we 
live. Nor must we wait for this conviction to come 
to us from the outside. 

Faith is a natural faculty, as much as judgment 
and memory and reason. It is a part of the behavior 
of the human soul. It gathers dignity from the 
Object which it approaches and upon which it bestows 
itself. The faith of a Newton — if it be only an intel- 
lectual opinion — may be a much less regenerating 
force than the faith of a negro slave who took his 
lashes and trusted God. Faith gathers dignity in 
the ratio of the supreme and commanding glory, 
power, lovableness and honor of its object. Faith is 
not the sum of our beliefs but the gathered mo- 
mentum of the soul. 



56 H flDessage for HU Souls 

The Spiritual Sphere is Real 

WHO are these who are neither cynical nor foolish; 
who seem not to feel the spasm of inward vexa- 
tion, nor are tossed on the constant upheaval of 
moral passion which feels itself helpless to relieve 
the cause of its pain? Long ago, they made the 
discovery that the spiritual sphere is real. To them 
the divine Presence is a conscious experience, and 
they dwell in the midst of the certainties which 
appear to the man " alive unto God." They stand 
amid the vexations, uncertainties and inequalities of 
our common life, as the rock stands though all the 
sea is beaten into foam about its base. They are 
not wanting in feeling; they are not untouched by 
what concerns their human brothers. They are not 
driven to despair ; they are in the best sense believers. 
" Great peace have they who love Thy law, and nothing 
shall cause them to stumble." 

The Faithful Soul Accepts God's WorTc 

FAITH is no longer the statement of the unproved 
and unprovable, established upon the authority 
of somebody's word. I would not have the world 
other than it is, in all its natural forces ; but I would 
make it other than it is in its social discredit and re- 
proach. The faithful man today accepts God's work ; 
the loyal soul is the faithful soul. The faithful soul 
would not have the universe jarred out of its course 
because he happens to be in the path of danger. He 
accepts the terms it sets for him. 



Gbe Xarger IDtsion 



The ideal life is the most practical because it is the 
most creative. 



H /iDessaae for Hll Souls 59 



PRAYER FOR DIVINE GUIDANCE 

TT7E thank Thee, God, for the nearness and 
n communion of the Most High, that we are 
not left alone to work out the problems of life, 
but are conscious of the constant leadership of the 
Holy Spirit. Oh, brood our spirits with Thine own, 
that nothing may seem impossible to us because it 
is part of the school of life. Grant that the way 
we take may seem to be Thy paths, that we go not 
on forced errands of duty, nor neglect the plain 
path of divine appointment. We thank Thee for 
life and strength and the privilege to do some 
part of Thy work in the world, and that we are 
Thy husbandry, planted in the soil of life, — Thy 
building, reared upon the foundations of Thy truth. 
Make us as temples in which Thou shalt come to 
dwell. 

Hear us, God, for those that have special need 
of Thee, for those that need to tell Thee what 
they can not forgive themselves, that they may be 
forgiven of Thee; and that those may be comforted 
whom no human voice can console. And for those 
that are sick, upon whom the temporary disability 
of life has fallen, let it not touch the soul; keep 
them quiet within the circle of the pain; and grant 
those who minister to them that they may be 
given grace so that their anxiety may not over- 
come their duty. To those who think there is 
death in the world, let them know that there is no 



60 H jflDessage for HII Souls 

death, and that all whom we call dead are living 
in Thy sight. 

Overshadow the land with Thy goodness, that 
all who minister in holy things of government as 
well as holy things of persuasion, may be minis- 
ters of the living God. Overshadow our personal 
endeavor, and keep us near to the guidance of Thy 
holy spirit. We ask these things as Thy children. 

Amen. 



H ZlDeggage for ail Soulg 6i 

The Fruit is the Test 

THE germ of human life contains enclosed all its 
future powers. No wonder that its primitive 
expression should seem a contradiction of its future, 
and the idea of the fall of man become a form 
of thought. Coarse-fibred wood, shaggy bark, un- 
fruitful expanse of foliage, apparently useless flower- 
ing, — all go before the generous yield of perfected 
fruit. But the fruit is the test. Neither stalk, nor 
branch, nor leaf, nor blossom is enough to mark the 
end of the tree's being, because they are but means to 
the end. "By their fruits ye shall know them." 
When we take up the fruit which has fallen ripe, 
and note its perfect form, and see what wise provision 
is in it for all its ends, — the enclosing of the seed, 
the nourishment for the young life, the chemical 
constituents, either of food for healthy life or medi- 
cine for disease, — we applaud the evidence of design, 
and when we look abroad over all varieties of such 
products, we see everywhere traces of wise and be- 
nevolent design. 

When all nature is thus full of design in all its 
lower orders of being, is it not strange that it should 
have been thought necessary to say that man fell from 
a high degree of perfection, from sinless holiness, 
and thus declare that God's work, so perfect every- 
where else, so full of design, failed in man, the 
highest expression of that work ? It was due to not 
understanding that the law of development, the 
method of evolution, applied also to the human work 



62 H Message for HII Souls 

of God. Man was in germ, as all things else; and 
his spiritual life, his deepest life, his highest life, 
developed last. " That was not first which was 
spiritual, but that which is natural/' All this is an 
argument " from design/' Carrying out the lines, 
which are converging from every side wherever there 
is a growing humanity, we find them meeting in the 
highest man. 

The World Ours to Use 

THE world is ours to use in a splendid way. It is 
too good to be abused, too good to be wasted. 
There is not enough of it to satisfy the ardent spirit 
that is in man. The poet exploits it, and turns it 
into the music of his verse ; the painter turns it into 
the colors on his canvas; the sculptor turns it into 
the arrested action of the figure that he carves ; and 
the common man and woman of our faith restore it 
to the hand of God, as a tribute of thanksgiving to 
the hand that gave it. It is ours to use, not to use 
up; and there can not be a more immoral state of 
mind than that of the man who says : " I have a good 
stand for business; but after me the deluge." 

The Unity of God and Man 

rtlHEEE is no possibility in the universe of isolat- 
-*■ ing, relegating to loneliness, any part of the 
universe, of which the central word is unity. Not- 
only must every fragment be found in the sum that 
is the whole, but every fragment must be found of 



H flBessafle for Hll Souls 63 

the same kind in the sum that is the whole. This is 
the unimpeached bond of religion : that righteousness 
in God can mean no other than righteousness in man, 
else we have an alien universe contending with God. 
In declaring for the being of God as necessary to 
man, we declare for the same word that in the 
physical world has come to be axiomatic and imper- 
ative ; that word is Unity. 



The Authority of Experience 

FT! HERE is great danger that we will be content to 
-L trade upon the religious conviction of the past 
and so come to regard even God himself as a figure 
in the history of human thought rather than a 
tremendous fact in present experience. Let us be 
instructed by the past. Thought does not move in 
a circle. If it did, there would be no advancement. 
It must move in a spiral where, although the lines 
are parallel to lines already drawn, they are higher, 
nearer the summit of certainty. By Jesus, the full 
tones of past religion are not merely rehearsed. He 
does not quote much ; He " speaks as One having 
authority." The only authority that can accompany 
a deliverance on such themes as these is the authority 
which is conveyed by experience. A man must live 
in the midst of these divine realities, then he will 
not speak as one who reports what he has gathered 
on the outskirts of a great truth, but will convey 
what that truth taught him when it became his 
own. 



64 H flDeggaae for HU Souls 

The Condemnation of the Trifler 

EVEN upon the face of a trifler is his condemnation 
written. In his life there is a want of power, 
intellectual, moral, social. There is no force in his 
speech, there is no power of sustained attention in 
his thought, there is no relish in his employments. 
He has played with life and has outgrown his toys. 
The power to see truth instantly is often lost in such 
a nature. He becomes incapable of an heroic attitude 
of mind, his athletic habit is lost, and the whole 
moral nature has turned to pulp. The habit of 
intellectual compromise makes thinking in straight 
lines dangerous. The habit of measuring details, 
instead of dealing with principles, tends to prop 
the soul here and there with the incidental and tem- 
porary instead of binding it fast in all its being with 
the eternal. A man who thus cobbles his life together 
will lose the sense of power as a sharer in the energy 
of the Creator. 

Definition is Not Reality 

ONE grows weary of the people who have a theory 
of things, — the great dramatic critic who can 
not write a line that anybody can play on the stage ; 
the great musical critic whom you would dismiss 
that you might hear an old darkey sing with his 
mellow voice, into which generations of tears have 
gone, and the agony of his people ; a minister of reli- 
gion whom you would follow beyond the theories of 
the philosophy of religion which he may have, and 



H flDesgage for SU Souls 65 

discover him in the practice of the things that he 
preaches. In all these instances we find the passage 
from traditionalism to what is personal and imme- 
diate. And the great heresy which substituted in- 
tellectual accuracy for an experience of life, lies at 
the root of insistence on traditionalism. Definition 
is not reality. Definition is never the thing de- 
fined. 

We define in order to get a piece small enough to 
handle. We are confused by the infinite. We say: 
" It may be dangerous to plunge into the infinite ; 
but so long as the chart is right, and the compass 
points true, and the man at the helm knows his 
business, let us sail the sea of the infinite until our 
ship goes to pieces, and then it will be time enough 
to know what may happen." All this is very com- 
fortable, but very limited. This is the defect: that 
we get so used to the definitions of religion that 
somehow we think it is the thing itself, whereas the 
thing defined is only a section of the whole to which 
we are related. All creeds are such definitions, — 
every creed is a philosophic statement, a speculative 
statement; and no philosophic or speculative state- 
ment can cover the whole fact. 



The Dignity of Human Nature 

WHEN" Dr. Channing in 1819 in Baltimore set 
the dignity of human nature over against the 
"total depravity" of man, challenging the doctrine 
of total depravity of the race by the doctrine of the 



66 H /Iftessaae for HU Souls 

dignity and divinity of human nature, it was as nota- 
ble as any Declaration of Independence ever penned ; 
for it was the statement that God had not made 
a thing of which He need be ashamed. You can not 
grow a crop of any kind — men or any other crop — 
out of stuff that is totally depraved. When the church 
declared its belief in total depravity and then started 
to live up to its faith, it reproached God and entered 
upon a dispensation of despair. We insist upon the 
dignity of human nature — that we are children of 
the great God and we belong to Him; that He can 
not get rid of us; that our business is to grow into 
His image and be like Him; that moral health is 
salvation, and to conform to the image of His Son 
constitutes the atonement. 

When Charles Carroll Everett uttered the phrase 
which has passed into a commonplace, that " human 
nature is not ruined but incomplete " it carried im- 
mediate conviction. Is it not evident that on that 
basis we are ready to begin any work and do anything 
for the betterment of our kind? But if humanity 
be totally depraved, then the sooner it is snuffed out 
the better. You can not keep an unremedied and 
contagious disease in contact with the race without 
hurting it. If that be the condition of God's creatures 
there is no remedy that we know except extinc- 
tion. The dignity of human nature is shown in every 
aspect of human life. From the most unexpected 
sources the beauty of human life has appeared, as 
when one stands surprised at the radiant beauty of 
a cactus-bloom that grows out of a thorny plant. 



H /IRessafle for HU Souls 67 

The dignity of human nature decreed the eman- 
cipation of the slave; and the Abolitionists who 
preached the doctrine waited for Abraham Lincoln to 
sign the decree of abolition, — Abraham Lincoln, 
who said that the only religion that he knew was the 
religion of love to God and love to man. The abolition 
of the slave was an impulse that was kindled under 
the snows of New England, and burned its way south- 
ward until the shackles were melted in the focussed 
fire of that intense desire which the Great Emanci- 
pator felt. The rise of democracy is the guarantee 
of the love of the other. There can be no slaves where 
love rules, there can be no slaves where the dignity 
of human nature is felt. 



The Fetich of Tradition 

TAKE any group assembled to discuss the revision 
of a Confession of Faith. Why should there be 
any question among them as to an ancient document 
if it can be stated in terms level to the facts of modern 
life ? The absolute sincerity of the church fathers is 
unquestioned. The absolute sincerity of the Con- 
stitutional Convention of 1787 is unquestioned but 
that did not hinder the passage of the 15th amend- 
ment which gave four millions of slaves their rights 
as citizens. And yet there were people following the 
Civil War who talked about the invasion of the Con- 
stitution. When you erect a document into a fetich 
you are simply in a retarded state of spiritual develop- 
ment. There is not much to choose between the 



68 H /iDessage for ail Souls 

orders of civilization with a fetich, an amulet or a 
totem and those who take a document which in its 
day was a very Ark of the Covenant to sincere souls, 
and say : " For all time this is to abide. The human 
mind has learned many a thing, but concerning these 
things it has stood absolutely still." We lament the 
loss of time and spiritual power in such a state of 
mind as that. 

We are pledged to the advance of science. What is 
theologically true must be true in the scientific sense 
as well. When we employ the scientific process, we 
mean that things are tested by a procession of thought 
from the fact to the conclusion, not from a supposi- 
tion back to the fact. Every man stands fronting two 
sets of phenomena in the world ; one set, the phenom- 
ena of the material universe; the other the phenom- 
ena of the spiritual universe. Why should he sup- 
pose for a moment that he can adjust himself to the 
material universe in terms consistent with his well- 
being as a creature without also by the same endeavor 
and purpose adjusting himself to the spiritual uni- 
verse as a child of God ? The two things go together 
and the separation of them has been the reproach of 
the churches. 



The Relation of Personality to Individuality 

THERE are manifold forms of what we call love 
of country. When President McKinley died, 
some men were angry against the assassin ; some men 
wanted the extirpation of anarchy; some were torn 



H flDeggage for HU Soula 69 

with solicitude for the household of the President. 
Those were manifestations of individual temper- 
ament and peculiarity. When at three-fifteen on the 
afternoon of that Thursday, this whole city under- 
stood that the plain casket had been taken from a 
simple home and was now wending its way to the 
place where it should be laid, the whole city stopped, 
uncovered the head, and waited. That impulse, that 
common submerging impulse, larger than any ques- 
tion of temperament, surrounded like a great sea 
these little islands of our peculiarities and stood with 
relation to them as personality stands with relation 
to the individuality of our lives. 

Personality inheres in the consciousness of self. 
I go out into the street, and some motor runs me 
down, and I lose an arm. I am hurt as an individ- 
ual, — that is, I am an individual less an arm. I 
have not been touched as a person at all; I am 
exactly the same person I was before. I have the 
same thoughts, the same loves I had before. So far 
as a man with one arm can carry out the enterprises 
that I had in mind, I shall carry them out. When 
one loses an arm, he is still «the same person but not 
the same individual. When, in the contact of life, 
one loses the power to love purely, to think nobly, 
to bear himself bravely, he is not hurt as an individ- 
ual but as a person. The love tide has ebbed and 
shall know no flood on that shore. It is the distinc- 
tion of the soul, when it has its rights, that it must 
keep up continually the speculative part of our 
nature. You have no business whatever in hand 



70 H flDessage for HU Souls 

except the growing of a human soul. Your individ- 
uality is of small importance; your personality 
everything. 

Courage is Essential to Salvation 

IF I were asked to name any one thing that is 
most saving to human life, I should say courage. 
A discouraged man puts the enervation of his own 
nature into his work, he puts the dulness of his own 
spirit into his work. His eye is dull. The eye must 
be purged of all film ; the heart must be true to every 
motion of the spirit's intention to see the work of 
God. The one thing we need in order to get on in 
life is not simply to make the best terms with life 
that we can, but to compel it to the best terms that 
we need. The motto that I saw over the door of 
George MacDonald's house in old English, " Corage ; 
God mend all ! " is the motto of every soul that is 
imbued with the faith that we profess. This courage 
is based first of all .on the facts that God is good, 
and God's world is a good world to be in with God. 

The Result of " Higher Criticism " 

THE Higher Criticism of the Scripture has re- 
sulted in restoring the New Testament to the use 
of thinking minds instead of having it repudiated by 
those who found parts of it impossible to believe. 
It is because students have discriminated between 
what was the Word of God to the human soul in a 
progressive revelation, and what were the accidents 



H flDessaae for HU Souls 71 

of literature in a moving procession of the centuries, 
that the Bible is prized today as never before by 
thinking men. Take the story of Jesus in the cursing 
of the fig tree. To have done that, because the tree 
had no figs on it when He was hungry, would have 
forever deposed Him from the leadership of men. 
No creature can claim to lead or save who is kindled 
to ignoble anger by personal disappointment. It is 
the business of people who think for themselves, to 
say that this incident never happened. 

The Critical Habit, and its Antidote 

THE most deadening thing in life is the critical 
habit — the habit as it appears in common life. 
It does not matter whether you care or not about 
the criticism. The great secret of defence is not to 
care if you are out when it rains mud. You simply 
wait until it dries and brush it off and it does not 
leave a spot. But the critic himself falls into the 
order of those for whom we have concern, because 
always it is the sinner that is to be pitied! The 
dreadful thing about sin is not its effect but the 
sin itself. And so the dreadful thing about criticism 
is not its effect, but the state of mind of the critic 
himself. It is a prevailing vice, a vice in the 
mind, arising either from egotism or a desire to 
play a clever part. Let such remember the instruc- 
tion : " Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, 
whatsoever things are reverend, whatsoever things are 
just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things 



72 H /iPessage for HU Souls 

are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; 
if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, 
think on these things." No man can get further than 
" the love of the truth." Meditating on the truth he 
loves, he shall himself become each day more like 
that absolutely True and Infinite who is of all truth 
the source and end. Passing thus, stage by stage, in 
the training of the mind, giving it supreme control 
and filling its realm with whatsoever has virtue, 
praise, good report, is lovely, pure, just, reverend, 
and true, the man who thus dedicates his immortal 
nature to a true hospitality toward such divine visi- 
tants as these " shall be changed into the same image 
from glory to glory, as by the spirit of the Lord." 
Thus may the least of us rule an inner realm and 
join in the loyalty to 

" One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves." 

The Path to the Quiet Spirit 

THERE are some minds that seek what will pro- 
duce a new sensation, without reference to its 
quality ; and they know only that they live when they 
are under the stimulating influence of excitement. 
They hit upon the unpleasant side of every walk in 
life, and fail of joy through constant irritation. They 
find the flaw in every character, and so lose faith in 
men, because they come to believe that all men are 
like the hideous image they have formed. They do 
not know how to give themselves up to gladness in 



H /iDessage for HII Souls 73 

the contemplation of God's beautiful world. To seek 
the gold in the quartz, not the quartz which encloses 
the gold ; the sweet among the things bitter ; the sound 
core in the center of surrounding decay, — this is the 
path to a quiet spirit; and it is the first step in that 
training which ends in the worship of the truth. 

The Spirit of the Mind 

WHAT shall it profit a man if he gain the 
whole world and lose himself ? The mind bar- 
tered for things ! Now, just this is what happens to 
a man, when instead of a body of flesh surrounding 
and housing a mind sensitive, the mind of flesh 
"dwells in the fleshly tabernacle." This is that 
carnal mind that is " enmity against God." There 
is needed the exhortation : " Be renewed in the spirit 
of your mind"; for there is something more to be 
determined about a mind than that it is a well- 
adjusted mechanism for turning out thoughts. We 
will never learn what a sacred thing reason is until 
we learn that as there is mind in the body, so there 
is a " spirit of the mind," which makes all the dif- 
ference between thinking and a thought. What sight 
is to the eye, what the engineer is to the engine, what 
flavor is to the fruit, what tone is to the organ, what 
quality is to the voice, that to the mind is the " spirit 
of the mind." 

The " spirit of the mind " is a unit. You cannot 
present its halves, turning its illumined hemisphere 
to the public and its night side to the home. A 



74 H /iDessage for HU Souls 

wholesome nature is a nature whole. As the air must 
penetrate every cell of the lungs in order to produce 
healthy action, so the spirit of the mind must appear 
in all its exercise, in all its thinking, in every rela- 
tion- in life, else either disease has set in or is 
threatening. When you say of a man, " There is a 
mean streak in his nature," " There is a coarse fibre 
in his make-up," " His influence is not good upon 
my boy," or you, yourself, are not so erect, so up- 
right, after being in his depressing company, — when 
you become thus conscious of the man, you may be 
sure it is the spirit of his mind which has impressed 
you. Therefore should the exhortation be heeded: 
Be renewed in the spirit of your mind." 



a 



Submission to the Spirit of God 

ONLY the Christian religion above all others was 
bold enough to declare, "All tilings are yours" 
" Every creature of God is good, and nothing to be 
refused if it be received with thanksgiving, for it is 
sanctified by the word of God and prayer." Chris- 
tianity clearly understands the identity of religion 
and common life. " Whatsover ye do, do it heartily 
as unto the Lord." " Not slothful in business, fer- 
vent in spirit, serving the Lord." But this divine 
philosophy can never take the place of the reigning 
secularism until men accept the condition which it 
prescribes. No penance of self-denial, no reform 
of ways and means, no lopping of branches, can do 
more than for a time retard growth. No mechanical 



H flDessage for HII Souls 75 

adjustment of the life to a model, though that model 
be faultless, can be sufficient. The spirit of man 
must submit itself to the spirit of God. It must have 
the downfall from on high upon it. It must "be 
born from above." 

The Ground of Spiritual Certainty 

TO apprehend a new truth the soul must already 
be in possession of a ground to stand on. It 
may not be larger than the two feet can occupy but 
it must be firm. If a man wants to get a steady view 
he must stand steadily while he looks. No man can 
see clearly through a fog or see far while he is in 
the trough of the sea. Neither is it good going, to 
any great end, to traverse the realm of conflicting 
opinion as one crosses a cranberry bog, where the 
weight must be shifted from one tussock to another 
to avoid sinking knee deep in the half floating bog. 
So in the vision of truth a man must have some stand- 
point capable of bearing his whole weight, and suf- 
ficiently elevated to give him a wide view. A man is 
indeed comforted who comes into the possession of 
a great truth. New or old it matters not, so it be 
true and so it be his. He is no longer tossed to and 
fro but reaches the ground of spiritual certainty. 

A Man Must Find Himself 

A MAN may not be sure of many things. In his 
heavens not many stars may shine. It may be 
the heavens are black with storm and impenetrable 



76 H /IDessage for HU Souls 

as midnight; yet the man may plod on under dark 
skies and reach home and comfort and rest, provided 
only he is sure of himself, strong to follow the road 
which stretches before him. Though he can scarcely 
see his foot before him he can feel his feet under 
him. Often a man has not taken account of himself, 
has not tested his own integrity. A man cannot be a 
judge of spiritual verities who has not defined his 
own relationship to the spiritual sphere, has not even 
confessed in himself the need of a spiritual life, — 
a life which draws its conscious inspiration from the 
ever-present spirit of God, — he has not found him- 
self. How can such a man be sure of himself ? Each 
man after his own order and in his own sphere must 
judge. 

The Lamp in the Temple 

IN some natures the inner light may be dim, grop- 
ing, and stumbling. They may seem to be walk- 
ing in the night. It may be true of these dark 
natures of whom we despair that "the lamp in the 
temple of the Lord " is not gone out, as in the days 
of the ancient apostasy, — when Eli was old and his 
sons were infamous priests, — the child Samuel lay 
awake in the temple watching the single flame burn- 
ing on the golden candlestick. We hold tenaciously 
to the thought of the naturalness of the light within. 
It belongs to humanity. It is not brought from with- 
out nor kindled from without. It is only fed from 
without. " The light in thee " is thine own, but 
only because the great central sun is thine own also. 



H Message for HIi Souls 77 

Motive! Work! Destiny! 

MOTIVE ! Work ! Destiny ! this is the sum of 
existence. Think how these portentous words 
are related to each other. Thus motive is the spring, 
work the action, destiny the condition. Motive is 
causative, work is operative, destiny is resultant. 
Motive is instinctive, work is expressive, destiny is 
conclusive. Motive is provided, work is accepted, 
destiny is awarded. Motive is a thread, work is a 
skein, destiny is a maze. Motive is simple, work is 
involved, destiny is inextricable. Motive is hidden, 
work is manifested, destiny is fixed. Motive is in- 
ternal, work is external, destiny is eternal. 

The Life of God " A Great Deep " 

SPECULATIVE theology always was and must 
be shallow. The deep-sea soundings of the life 
of God show nothing brought up from that abysm. We 
move about the errands of our little lives upon the 
surface of this profound of being. We have forgotten 
the day we set sail. We do not know on what shore 
we shall land at last. We are carried willingly for- 
ward by that breath of God that "breatheth where 
it will." We rejoice to feel the tides of the Eternal 
Spirit lift and sway us; but when we would sound 
this awful depth, our plummet swings in the shifting 
currents of the surface near the hand which holds 
it, and the silent deeps of God give back no word. 
" Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great 
waters. Thy footsteps are not known." " Thy right- 



78 h /IDesgaQe for HU Soulg 

eousness is like the great mountains. Thy judg- 
ments are a great deep." 

The Moral Use of Optimism 

THESE is a moral use in optimism that the pessi- 
mist never can reach; there is a moral function 
for the optimist which the cynic wholly ignores. 
The optimist, the man who believes not that things 
are at their best but that things are coming to their 
best, is the man who must of necessity be classed with 
the believers, as the pessimist must be classed with 
the deniers. Life is not all shining and brilliant, all 
fair and attractive; there is an under side of the 
embroidery, however beautiful the pattern may be 
on its upper side, that when it is reversed seems 
disaster and contradiction, and the stitches are all 
awry. Yet the optimist and the believer belong to 
the same class; they belong to the class that has in 
charge the moral triumph of the world. 



Zbe (Srowtb of tbe Soul 



Directness of action in moral obligation is the great 
proof of real moral integrity and power. Expedience 
must not be considered. 



H flbessagc for BU Souls 81 



PRAYER FOR INSPIRATION 

TO Thee, Father, we come praying for the inspi- 
ration of Thy holy spirit. Breathe upon us 
also; and since Thou hast given us so much to be 
glad for, add this also, that we shall be glad in God. 
Since Thou hast filled our hands with Thy boun- 
ties, let us not hold them too tightly away from 
those who lift their empty hands. Thou hast filled 
our hearts with Thy love. Give freedom of spirit 
to minister unto woe and want and the famine of 
the heart of the world. May the beautiful desires 
for the holy life be not a mere sentiment that 
pleases us, but an evangel of delight; and God's 
law sing to us as we strive to do His will! 

More than all things else, we seek Thy presence 
to be known to us. Thou dost surround us like the 
air; Thou dost enter into us like our blood; Thou 
art the light of all our seeing; and the joy of every 
day. And yet, oh God! how dim, how far, how un- 
certain all that is really seems to us, many a time, 
when Thou art so near. Let us know Thee for our 
element. The breath of our life Thou hast breathed 
into us; let it escape our lips in trust and prayer 
and adoration of the Eternal Source of being. 

We opened our eyes upon the world of God. Let 
us not be weary of its perplexities, nor disheartened 
by its uncertainties, but see Thee moving behind 
all the seeming show of things. Steady us when 
we fall into lethargy and droop by the way; rally 



82 H /iDessage for HU Souls 

our nature that is the product of Thy creative 
hand to the uses of the Divine Will, so that every 
function of our being shall belong to God. Make 
our bodies the temple of the Holy Ghost. Make 
our spirits obedient, oh God, that we may be the 
sons of God. Amen. 



H /IDessage for HU Souls 83 

Sin Damages the Soul 

THEEE is scarcely a sin that you can name the 
enormity of which does not lie in the fact that it 
hurts the soul. There is not one of them that can 
have its shadow fall upon the human soul without 
leaving its stain there. "He that sinneth against 
Me, wrongeth his own soul." There is a loss of 
function, a limiting of capacity, a dulling of sensi- 
bility, a new callus grown upon the place that was 
sensitive; and from the frivolities of life to life's 
enormities, the sin lies in the fact that it damages 
the soul. The soul can not know God now as it 
could have known God before, and can not deal 
with life now as it could have before. "God formed 
man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into 
his nostrils the breath of life," says the Scripture. 
That is a complete statement as to man's beginning, 
but that is not the history of man. The history lies 
in the added sentence: "And man became a living 
soul." 

The Soul Makes its own Scriptures 

SOME people say, "It is enough for me that the 
church tells me of God. It is enough for me 7 
that the Scripture tells me of God." Suppose you 
should be cast on some desert island. Suppose you. 
took your passage in the "Spray," that little boat 
that made the circuit of the world with Captain 
Slocum. Suppose you were there without Bible, 
without means of grace. You would be reduced to 



84 H /IDessaoe for Hii Souls 

your primitive instincts. Instead of a prayer that 
you could repeat trippingly upon the lips, your 
prayer would be an inarticulate cry out of the depths 
of your nature. You would turn to your soul and 
explore it, and make some scripture for yourself, as 
has ever been done by prophets in distress who have 
made their scripture out of the soul. And there 
alone under the open sky, with the great sweep of 
waters on every side, you would have to find God 
for yourself, if you had been depending upon sec- 
ondary causes and "means of grace" alone. 

The Plane of the Human 

LIFE, mind, person, — these must be in the Ulti- 
mate Eeality because they are manifestly in its 
effects. The rise of the world to its Humanity is the 
thing we look forward to, not because of its indi- 
viduality but because of its personality. What we 
are trying to do is not to perfect the individual but 
to rise to the plane of the human. The ideal that 
rises before us is not the merely perfect man or 
the merely perfect woman. What we are looking 
for is a human creature in whom the person shall 
be regnant above the form; in whom the person 
shall be vindicated above the accidents of life; in 
whom personality shall seem to be an incarnation 
of the Divine. The proof that we are looking for 
this is the way in which our hearts respond to the 
statement in John's gospel with respect to the 
great personality of Nazareth : "The Word was made 



H /IDessage for Hil Souls &> 

flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth." 
The perfection of His humanity is the ground of 
His influence over us. 

A New World 

YOU try to get Christ's view of God's world as it 
lies out before you. It is like some morning in 
the high hills when everything is mist-hung ; when 
the curtain of the mist is over all the world, and the 
water has been blotted out yonder in the lake, and 
a vapory cloud is between you and the hills beyond. 
Suddenly the sun comes out and drinks all the 
mist; and yonder lies the blue of the lake and the 
further blue of the hills and the nearer green of 
the forest, and the singing of the birds is the accom- 
paniment of the coming of light. And it is a new 
world: it was always there, but was mist-hung until 
now. So in that moment of the revealing of God in 
Christ, there is the lifting of all shadow; and the 
soul suns itself, waiting to know the will of God, 
saying, "What shall I do in the world, with it and 
for it 'in His name'?" 

Climbing up to Him 

THE Christ life was lived upon the most intimate 
terms with God. When you have reached the 
decision that the humanity of Jesus stands for your 
humanity and his relation to God is your relation; 
when you offer your prayers, not "f or the sake of 
Christ," but "in His name," that is, standing in 
His stead; when you think of God as you hope and 



86 a /IDessage for Bil Souls 

believe He thought of God; when the Fatherhood of 
God means to you what it meant to Him, the Broth- 
erhood of the dear Lord comes to you in a way that 
is a revelation. You climb up the steep path by 
which He won His way, hearing His "All Hail!" 
from the cliff above you; and climbing up to His 
vantage, you look once in His face for very love's 
sake and then try to see what He sees. To love 
what He loves is a way of loving Him that He would 
wish. 

"To reconcile the Christ," is the business of those 
who believe in Him; — to make the law of his life 
our law ; to make the processes of our life dominated 
by His spirit, not simply coincident with the de- 
tails of His life. To believe in Him is to catch His 
secret and tell it again; is to relate ourselves to the 
sources of His inspiration as He was related to them ; 
is to feel within the banks of our common life the 
full flood of such a life as His. 

The Tone of the Instrument 

SOME men front the world from birth with excep- 
tional endowment ; but this only adds to respon- 
sibility. For them there is the additional danger 
of great gifts unused. Therefore it is that the tem- 
per and tone of the nature is to be the very first 
care. We speak of a man of fine temper as we speak 
of the fine temper of a weapon or tool. If two thou- 
sand years have been spent in trying to discover 
the secret of Damascus steel, it would seem to be 



H Message for HU Souls 87 

labor, thought and care well bestowed to find a 
texture and substance in our own natures which shall 
keep a perfect edge and show an unflagging pliabil- 
ity and spring under the strain and use of life. The 
whole man is to be "tempered together" and "com- 
pacted by that which every joint supplieth." Nor 
does this cause us to run into the danger of artificial- 
ity or lack of simplicity. One of the simplest in- 
struments is a violin. We measure its resource by 
the quality of its tone. So there are natures, mellow, 
simple, rich, which give forth a tone, when touched, 
which is worth more than any word accompanying it. 
This is the unconscious influence of a nature at- 
tuned to the sublimest harmonies. The unconscious 
impact of one sweet, rich, true inner life upon the 
inner life of another is the source of finest usefulness. 
That person whose nature lias been made strong and 
true by thought, by prayer, by communion with all 
that is highest and best will purify the atmosphere 
of the place he enters; he will re-enforce the feeble 
whom he approaches; he will rebuke sin without 
naming it; and he will raise to the highest power 
the efficiency of those who may be doing not much, 
but only what they can. 

There are men put together so loosely that one 
should suppose that they were made out of ordinary 
tow, without any twist put into it. Such a man 
will not bear a pound's strain. He frays out, pulls 
apart. He is just oakum that has ceased to be rope 
and can be used only as filling. On the other hand, 
there is the high-toned man, strung to the tension 



88 h Message for HU Souls 

of his greatest power. He makes the music of the 
world by the virtues which he discourses to the world 
in which he is placed. I was speaking on a platform 
one night and a cello, strung just as the musician 
had set it down, was standing behind me and, as I 
spoke, I could hear it answer. Every tone of the 
voice was taken up by the tense strings of the in- 
strument. So is it with the man who is 'Tiigh 
toned." 

Moral Coalescence 

TESTIS spoke always of Himself as holding that 
** relation to God which He would have his dis- 
ciples hold. Observe that marvelous prayer in the 
seventeenth chapter of John's gospel in which He 
prays "that they may be one as Thou, Father, art in 
Me and I in Thee, that they may be made one in 
Us." It is the declaration of that moral coalescence 
which is to make the human one with the divine. 
"The things I do, shall ye do also," He says to his 
disciples, and "greater things than these shall ye do, 
because I go unto My Father." Again He says : "Be 
ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which ia 
in Heaven is perfect." 

The Way of Escape 

MANY suggestions of evil, impure thoughts, un- 
worthy motives, unhappy memories can be best 
resisted by being ignored, literally denied hospital- 
ity in souls engaged for better visitants. For the 
rest — life-long foes, besetments which are ours by 



H /iDessage for Eli Souls 89 

heritage, temptations which float on the tides which 
"visit our sad hearts," which make discords upon 
our nerves, — there is naught for such as these but 
resistance to the death. Let us remember "God is 
faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above 
that ye are able, but will with the temptation make 
also a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it." 
The way of escape comes with the temptation, not 
away from it. To bear life's discipline is more noble 
than to avoid it. We can not cast our temptations 
nor the pressure of life at times of crisis on God in 
any ignoble way, or substitute luxury for victory, 
or idleness for work. 

Triumph over Limitation 

WHAT fixes responsibility? Not man's circum- 
stantial surroundings, but man's alliance with 
circumstantial surroundings; not man's inherited 
temperament so much as the cultivation by encour- 
agement or vigorous pruning of inherited tempera- 
ment; not the appeals of sin, but the entertainment, 
or high scorn with which he meets the appeals of sin. 
Like the green withes, bursting like burnt flax from off 
Samson's godlike limbs, these limitations of circum- 
stance, temperament and temptation fall away from 
the sublime soul that has kept its covenant with God. 
If the integrity of life is difficult to maintain, 
remember that nature has ordained that every strug- 
gle shall help to quicken the soul, harden the fibre, 
strengthen the muscle, cleanse the blood; and that 



90 H flpessage for HU Souls 

the only way of salvation is to be like Him of Naz- 
areth, who was "the best example of the saved man." 
Why? For the simplest of all reasons: that He is 
the best example in history, so far as we have any 
record, of one who lived His life wholly in con- 
sciousness of the oneness of the soul with God. This 
is our destiny. 

The Quality of Reverence 

THE human mind needs to be alone with itself. 
It needs to be quiet and to brood and fashion 
its own life out of "reverence for the things that are 
above," "for the things that are around, and for the 
things below," as Goethe has said. That is an es- 
sential quality of the well-ordered mind. The things 
above provoke it to worship ; the things around pro- 
duce in it the sense of fellowship; reverence for the 
things below inspires it to the great compassions of 
life. Eeverence is an essential quality of the well- 
ordered and normal mind and the believer is dealing 
with the reverential quality in the mind. Your 
children live in a world of mythology, of fancy, of 
fairy stories. They say things about the Eternal 
that sometimes seem irreverent ; but it is the wonder- 
element — their very reverence — that leads them to 
say these things. 

Uelestial Relationships 

WE stretch our hand upwards in prayer ; we would 
embrace the immediate God. We fall upon the 
earth in adoration: it is holy ground which pulses 



H /©essage tor Hii Souls 91 

with His life ! We feel as though our hearts would 
break for the sorrow of the world, for it is missing 
the vision of the Eternal. We kindle not from below, 
but from above. We would not ask Him to grant us 
anything but to be near. We turn from supplica- 
tion as from something individual, not personal ; and 
prayer is divine affection seeking its own. The flower 
is opening because the sun has risen; the earth is 
warm because the sun is shining; the banks are full 
because the snow is melting: it is summer in the 
soul! 

Let us consider how the moment the heart warms 
with fires which are pure, the moment the mind 
opens to the summer that seems celestial, the moment 
that human relations pass from being personal to 
being ideal, the moment my friend becomes to me 
not simply a personal presence, but an embodied 
ideal, so soon the heavens are open and the angels 
of God begin to descend upon the humanity new- 
awakened in the soul. Let us do this first ; let us love 
all things that are lovable in order that we may love 
all unlovely things. And in the first estate we shall 
worship and in the next estate we shall serve. 

A New Motive in Religion 

THERE has come into religion a new motive, — 
the assertion not of the individual, but the ado- 
ration of an inclusive personality. The old heroism, 
by which the martyr refused to deny his Lord, is 
substituted now by that finer loyalty of the devout 



92 H flfcessage tor Hll Souls 

soul to the order of the universe which is no longer 
individual, but personal; and he can not deny that 
great "Other" without the alternative that he has 
repudiated himself. This is that personality, like 
an ever-present ideal, declaring to our conscious 
souls "he that sinneth against Me wrongeth his own 
soul." No man looking up into the heavens can 
fail to add, "In all worlds, love must be better than 
hate." 

The Search for God 

THE struggling soul matches one argument against 
another, trying to join the edges of its apprehen- 
sion of the reality of things, seeking to fix a dial upon 
which it may register the discoveries of its expe- 
rience; and when it has done its utmost, it then de- 
scends into the deep places of religious emotion and 
finds the wells of life deep and crystal clear; here 
is the center of the divine affections. The Soul 
can know God only in terms of love. "Canst thou 
by searching find out God ? " is an inquiry as ancient 
as human failure returning from its search. It has 
an answer for all time in that beatitude, "Blessed 
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 

A mean man can not find God because all the 
doors of the heart open from the inside and there 
is no power by which the Divine Providence can 
pry open the door of the heart that is securely bolted 
by the man who lives within. No unclean man can 
find God. No man of filthy imagination can find 



H /iDessage for ail Souls 93 

God. Xo man who is intent upon exploiting his 
fellow can find God. It was no accident that one 
sang centuries before Jesus came, "I shall awake 
in Thy likeness"; "Guide me by Thy counsel and 
afterwards receive me to glory." These statements 
of the Psalms are part of the soul's instinct that our 
business is to move with God's motion, who is the 
center of all motion; to think His thoughts after 
Him; to love according to His fashion; to be com- 
passionate like God; to be tender with an infinite 
tenderness, and to "haste not, rest not" in doing His 
will. 

Saving your Soul 

TOXJ can not save your soul. If you are ever 
saved, your soul will do it. You could just as 
well talk about a man saving his seed-wheat by keep- 
ing it in his barn. He saved it and his field has 
grown up to grass: he has not any harvest but he 
has saved his seed-wheat. Another man does not 
save it at all but flings it into the ground which he 
has ploughed and harrowed, prepared and mellowed, 
until it is ready for just that kind of thing that 
seed-wheat is. He flings it away but the next autumn 
the abundant harvest of his rich acres will show 
that his seed-wheat saved him. It is just so with 
the soul. You can not "save your soul" without 
"losing it." God put into man the breath of life 
and said to him "Save your kind." The business of 
life is to get a grip on something that is not strong 



94 H /i&essaae for HU Souls 

enough to strike out for itself. It is not a question 
whether we shall live forever — it is a question whether 
in the sight of God and man we are fit to live for- 
ever. It is not a question of finding heaven but of 
being heavenly; the rounding of character, the flow- 
ering of every faculty in our nature. 

"There are some natures so constituted that they 
are doomed to deep feeling and high thinking, and 
the only rescue for them is in deeper feeling and 
higher thinking." This is the reason why natures 
not so robust grow weary of the struggle to know 
God, to know his will and to do their duty; and be- 
ing weary, at length supinely recline upon some 
authority that is baseless as a cloud. They can not 
thus be saved. They can not be saved by another; 
they must be saved first from themselves. There is 
no permanent rescue for the struggling soul but to 
struggle through. The human soul which has learned 
its flight must forever wing its way. 

The Next Responsibility 

CAN the soul know God and does it know when 
God speaks to it? That is the thing we are 
to struggle for, from first to last; and if we do not 
realize it in some sense we have not touched the 
border of the religious life. 

Did Jesus deal gently and suavely with life? 
No! He dealt with life as a surgeon. He said, 
"Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's 
eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own 



H flliessaae for Hli Souls 95 

eye?" He dealt with things as they were and built 
from the ground up. Our business is to get our 
responsibility so near home that it can be attended to. 
We have got to focus responsibility well in the fore- 
ground of our life. 

The High Prerogative of Souls 

TT would be unwholesome if human beings in God's 
-*- world were so sin-ridden or sorrow-laden that 
they could never be quiet in spirit nor complacent, but 
to be self-satisfied is quite another matter; and no 
human being can tell that another human being is 
self-satisfied, without being that very self, because 
quiet of the external manner may very well be a 
mask to hide inward convulsion. A Japanese who is 
the perfection of good breeding will smile while he 
tells you of the death of some one near to him, — 
because the idea has been ingrained through genera- 
tions that it is the business of life to make life easy 
for the other. It is the high prerogative of souls 
to take burdens from others, but it is not ours to 
lay them upon others. 

The Triumph of Goodness 

OTJE real trouble is that we do not believe in good- 
ness. We worship smartness; we worship 
cleverness; we worship wealth. The real necessity 
is, that the man in the rough and tumble of life, if 
he would save himself alive, must believe in the ulti- 
mate triumph of goodness. Failure to believe this is 
the only infidelity left in the world. A man can not 



96 H /iDessage for BU Souls 

philosophically say, "There is no God." We have 
worked out of the materialism in which it was said 
man had no soul. The only real infidelity is that of 
a man who prefers to get on, no matter how soon he 
may have to get off. His ideal is accumulation, 
aggrandisement, position, elevation; when if for one 
day he were enamored of goodness, he would feel as if 
he had been living to no purpose. 

So we are given not only to the passion for the 
truth but to the love of goodness. Often, the in- 
cisive, the far-down, the deep trouble is that men do 
not believe in the triumph of goodness. Men who 
believe in that would stake everything on it. But 
you will meet other men at the crossing of the roads 
of some moral action, and if you could look into 
their minds, you would find them spending their 
energy and power of mind and strength upon a nice 
balancing of probabilities, as to whether they can 
sail close to the reefs of wrong-doing and yet escape. 
They spend upon that question energies of soul and 
mind that would make saints of them if it were ap- 
plied to the real development of spiritual life. 

The Tempered Nature 

THE absolute temper, the absolute poise of 
nature, the absolute self-possession in a man 
in whom the fruit of the Spirit appears in 
temperance, assures him that he is well along 
toward that salvation which is moral health and 
power. God shall surely want him for some great 



H flDessage for Hil Souls 97 

work in this world's life. The problem in life is a 
tempered nature that shall do its work all the way 
round, and shall order its emotions to follow the 
guidance of its reason, and shall order its reason not 
to hold itself too stiffly before the appeals of its emo- 
tions. 

The Attitude of the Meek 

WHAT shall be said of meekness ? Is it a certain 
inaptitude to take one's own part ? No ! I am 
put in trust of my own powers as you are, and of 
my own decisions and of all which concerns my life. 
It is not meekness which refuses to be brave: it is 
cowardice ! But there is an attitude of the soul in 
which meekness dwells which stands before God and 
is humble; which stands before human life and is 
moved by moral passion, the greater because it feels 
all unworthy to do the part which it hungers to do. 
It stands before life's mystery and commits itself to 
God, who knows the end from the beginning. This 
is the meek man who "shall inherit the earth/' says 
Jesus, for he is the only man fit to have it. 

Long-Suffering 

LOVE," "joy" "peace," "long-suffering," "gen- 
tleness" go together. Long-suffering means 
to hold our ideals in spite of our pain, and gentle- 
ness is the speech of suffering which gasps to recover 
its breath from pain and speaks not words out of 
pain, but out of peace. 



98 H /iDessage tor BU Soulg 

We have known people in our lives to whom we 
have gone simply to sun ourselves in their presence, 
and they were sufferers. It was not their suffering 
which was like imprisoned sunshine ; it was the deep, 
abiding confidence of the soul; the power of the 
spirit that went to its windows in its prison when 
the light was failing and uttered its prayer for peace. 
This is "long suffering" with "gentleness." "Good- 
ness" stands next in the ascending series. The nun 
in her cloister is the embodiment of gentleness. The 
Sister of Charity in the slums is the embodiment of 
goodness. The one prays in her cloistered seclusion 
and grows intimate with God; the other prays and 
goes out into the shadows to find those whom God 
never forgets. She follows the path where pain 
has left its trail and goes into places where no hu- 
man creature should live; and there the goodness 
which is gentleness, grown mellow and ripe, achieves 
a comfort which no prayer alone can ever achieve. 

The Unused Talent 

IT is not necessary that a man shall achieve a 
great work but it is necessary that the thing 
which he does shall be in just proportion to his work- 
ing power. The work in life is to be judged by moral 
values, not by standards either mechanical or numeri- 
cal. This is the reason why it is better a man should 
expend all his power in his work than that he should 
have great powers to expend. Nothing is so deaden- 
ing to right living as a balance of unused faculty. 



H ZlDessage for BU Souls 99 

It seems to infect with its decay the whole man, so 
that what he once did well, being only a part of what 
he might have done, comes at last to be difficult to 
do, from the weight of indifference and lethargy laid 
upon him by the gifts he has failed to use. 

The Potency is God's 

THE fact is that the susceptibility is ours, and the 
potency is God's. We are the sensitized plates 
and the light is His. The soil is ours, capable of 
all fertility; but the downfall from on high is His, 
capable of awakening all fertility. The fruit of the 
Spirit may be found in that man who works as 
though he worked alone and trusts as though he had 
none to help but God; and puts his endeavor into 
his whole business as though all things were expected 
of him without assistance ; and looks for divine guid- 
ance and aid as though he had no potentiality of 
his own. When nature comes to this union of the 
human with the divine, it discovers that the human is 
divinely inspired, and the divine is humanly per- 
ceived. 

Our Riches and Our Poverty 

THIS is at once our riches and our poverty, that 
we can not know anything except from our ex- 
perience. It is our poverty if we be poor in experi- 
ence; it is our riches, if we be rich in experience: 
that is just the difference between one man's revela- 
tion concerning divine things and another man's. 



ioo H /Message tor Hil Souls 

One man speaks the commonplace because he is com- 
monplace; the other man speaks the things divine 
because the secret of the Lord is with him. Human- 
ity is instructed by the secret ministry of the soul's 
growth ; and the Son of Man becomes the representa- 
tive, the medium by which heaven may be known to 
earth and earth make strides heavenward, in an en- 
larged humanity which is the perfect revelation of 
the divine. 

Self -Discovery 

THE soul must have its momentum today. It can 
not get on by being wound up to a false enthusi- 
asm by a spiral spring fastened back some thousands 
of years. The thing / think I think is a poor sub- 
stitute for the abiding conviction of the soul that 
knows the Eternal is the Great Companion of its 
days. I am sure that no other discovery that has 
been made has found its true reason and motive for 
being unless the soul has discovered itself; that is 
the mission of every human being, — to live the life 
which shall every day be a voyage into the infinite 
and every night a return from a pilgrimage rich with 
discoveries. 

The Registry of the Soul 

ril HAT is a fine statement of the philosophy of life 
-L that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
gives, referring to Moses, when he says that the secret 



H /IDessaoe for Hll Souls 101 

of his moral fibre and strength was that cr he endured 
as seeing Him who is invisible." This test of the 
spiritual sphere appears also by the personal testi- 
mony of the finest souls that they have been discov- 
ered themselves by something that the expert failed 
to discover. 

As an illustration, consider that instance in the 
astronomical observatory, where the prepared plate 
was set in its place by the telescope, that the registry 
of the sidereal heavens might be made on it, the whole 
machinery keeping pace with the motion of earth and 
planet. Then the astronomer comes and finds upon 
the sensitized plate marks that he had not expected. 
Beside the photographed star and planet, he finds 
what he takes to be flaws and defects in the plate. 
He moves it away and puts another in its place for 
the next night's experiment, and the same flaws and 
defects are there, and so again and again until there 
is borne in upon him the conviction that something 
has looked into the instrument, and telegraphed its 
meaning and photographed its appearance, which the 
eye through the instrument could not discover. The 
realities which find you are the witnesses of God. 
Given a sensitive soul and God, all discoveries are 
possible. Given the sensitive eye in perfect condi- 
tion and the external world, you may have a land- 
scape of Corot or Rousseau. Given the sensitive soul 
and the spiritual sphere, you have this statement: 
"To this end was I born, for this cause came I into 
the world, that I should bear witness unto the 
truth." 



102 H /IDessage for Hil Souls 

Revelation is Not Closed 

STILL the word of Paul shall be our word : "Hav- 
ing the same spirit of faith, according as it is 
written, I believed and therefore did I speak; we 
also believe, and therefore we also speak." Kevela- 
tion is not closed. "Much light shall yet break" 
upon the soul of man. So the soul shall stand and 
prophesy; send its love out to its ideal that it calls 
God; send its love out to its beloved that it holds 
just less than God ; prophesy ! sing ! pray ! find prayer 
the law of its being; find divine affections the sacra- 
ment of its days, and conscious that it has set up a 
commerce between what it is and what is for it, come 
to be what it now is by virtue of the celestial ex- 
change. 

The Soul's Initiative 

THE will of God still is a corona of light about 
the soul's brightest day, and a luminous margin 
inviting it out beyond its best endeavor. What is its 
history ? what are its claims ? The first of all : Every 
man may find God for himself. For every one of us 
the guarantee of the revelation of God is that each 
man, standing alone, without book, without priest, 
without church, without creed, without anything — 
only God and the man together — shall find God for 
himself. That is the first condition. The next is 
that this soul that hath found God for itself — has 
the right to its own discoveries and may not have 
them disputed by any man. By virtue of its own 



H /IDessase tor HIl Souls 103 

power to sail over unknown seas, and find its way, 
by virtue of its own power to land with firm tread 
upon its new-discovered realm, the soul has this right. 

The Man of Conscious Power 

I THINK of a man of business and of common du- 
ties, of unheroic and unpoetic days, to whom in 
some business transaction every appeal of self-interest 
is made; to whom every solicitation of worldly-wise 
friends is offered; to whom great opportunities pre- 
sent themselves tempting him to grasp with hands of 
passion that which never should be his, except as the 
crown of patience. All these influences are clamoring 
about him, like the cry of a mob, that he shall do this 
or that. What does he do? He moves like that 
simple Nazarene through the crowd at Nazareth who 
clamored about Him and would cast Him from the 
brow of the hill whereon the town was built. It is 
written: "He, passing through the midst of them, 
went His way." So this soul, pure in its purpose, 
strong in its struggle, conscious of having relation 
with Eealities, goes its way which is not theirs. 

If we would discover the ground of strength in any 
life, we must seek to know the terms in which the 
universe is interpreted by that life. If the life be 
genuinely strong, some effort to interpret the uni- 
verse more or less completely will be found. Weak 
natures are content to drift from point to point, 
close-in-shore, but those who are strong, steering by 
some proved compass or by the heavens, venture out 



104 H flDessage for Hli Souls 

upon the deep. They have abandoned themselves to 
the will of God and let themselves go upon life's tide 
with small care of what becomes of them. These 
are they who hear the voice : "Thou art my beloved 
son; in thee I am well pleased." 

The Worth of the Human Spirit 

BECAUSE a man can no longer calculate the rela- 
tion which he has to that Infinity before whose 
eye a thousand years are as a single day, nor can 
measure his little stride with the march of the millen- 
niums, he cries, "What is man that thou art mindful 
of him and the Son of man that thou visitest Him ?" 
"I shall not be remembered," he says, "in the multi- 
tude of the creation." It is a mistake to suppose 
that when the fancy lies prostrate the reason is de- 
throned. It should stand erect over the prostrate 
fancy and work out the problem by which it is to 
be erected to self-respect. For the fact remains that 
the multitude of the immensities of the material 
world have nothing to do with determining the worth 
of the human spirit. 

The Discoveries of the Soul 

I ASK you to contemplate the soul stuff out of 
which the kingdom of heaven on earth is built 
up. These souls have had their struggle; they are 
now at work upon the field they have conquered. 
What are the discoveries that they have made ? First : 
that nothing saves a man but strength of soul. No 



H Message for ail Souls 105 

matter what urges him, from the moment he is 
aroused in the very depths of his being, there are 
but two paths open to him. The one leads to life by 
struggle, and the other leads to destruction by the 
abandonment of struggle. This is the soul's first 
discovery, — that work is the price of ease, that strug- 
gle is the price of victory, that pain is the price of 
comfort. And he accepts the terms the higher life 
proposes. 

Another discovery the sincere soul makes is this: 
he is not to seek ease, or anticipate victory, or long 
for comfort. He has but one concern, — to address 
himself to his work with a perfect fidelity, to wage 
his battle with an unimpeachable loyalty, to bear his 
pain without rebellion, knowing that no more can be 
expected of him than this, whatever may be the out- 
come, he must keep the faith and covenant with his 
own nature to be true. He can not tell how his work 
will result; he can not tell whether the victory will 
be worth having when it is won. He does not know 
whether the comfort he will have will be permanent, 
or prove the prelude to new pain. All he knows is 
the momentary pressure and the instant struggle 
which engages him and he has the right to expect of 
himself an absolute sincerity. 



Characteristics of the Strong 

rPHE three characteristics of a strong, quiet soul 
-*- are: first, a dedication of the whole nature 
to an honorable struggle: second, a sincerity that 



106 H /iDessage for Hll Souls 

is like white light in showing forth reality; third, 
a determined reference of obscure and vexing prob- 
lems to the laws of life, so that incidents of experi- 
ence become the commentary upon the principles 
which are the groundwork of character. Those who 
have these characteristics are the only ones who 
have a reason or the power to stand calm and strong 
before those who are still struggling with the woe of 
the world. As they stand in the presence of sorrow 
and suffering they are not indifferent, — by no 
means ! Their faith is large ; they believe that God 
is health and sanity and blessedness; they feel con- 
fident that God will pour his life yet more and more 
into these desert places of the world. Believing in 
God they labor looking up, not sorrowing "as those 
who have no hope." The most splendid thing in the 
world is to see a soul in action, unencumbered, not 
self-inquisitive, not self -accusatory. You speak of a 
delicate piece of machinery, when its adjustment is 
perfect and its power is applied as being "in action." 
The mind of man has never conceived anything so 
intimately intricate, so delicately poised, so marvelous 
in action, so multifarious in results, as the mind 
itself. To see a human soul in action under the im- 
pulse of a regnant purpose, that is chieftain for all 
the clans of the emotions, and regnant over all the 
rebellions of the nature, is to behold the most beauti- 
ful thing that God could make, behaving itself in the 
most beautiful way that it can discover. 



H /IDessage for Hil Souls 107 

The Organ of Spiritual Knowledge 

IT is a wonderful process that goes on in the human 
mind, when the soul which thought it only had 
to be instructed — that the mind had only to be in- 
formed — all of a sudden realizes the conviction that 
man has an organ of spiritual knowledge, just as he 
has organs of sight and of hearing and of touch. The 
organ of spiritual knowledge is the power to select the 
thing that is noble enough to follow and to follow it to 
the end. In the process, things that were in doubt 
have arranged themselves; convictions that were con- 
flicting have fallen into line ; aims that were contra- 
dictory now seek the guidon to which they rally; un- 
certainties have fallen to quiet securities in the obedi- 
ent mind. This is the picture of utter sincerity. 

Celestial Attraction Greater than Earthly Gravitation 

IN the statement of Paul, "As is the earthy, such 
are they also that are earthy" is meant all that 
range of things belonging to the lower nature, out of 
which we have come with infinite struggle until we 
achieve a moral sense, until we believe that we are 
spiritual beings. "God formed man of the dust of the 
ground" is the first chapter in his evolution. He 
"breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man 
became a living soul" suggests all other chapters of 
his evolution. You can make an earthy nature out 
of hand; but it takes the ages to create an immortal 
spirit. "He became a living soul." He is still becom- 
ing. 



108 H /Message for Hii Souls 

In the statement of John's epistle, the same splen- 
did announcement is made, that we began on earth 
and were celestially attracted. However strong the 
pull to the center of the planet may be, the lift to 
the center of the heaven is greater. "It doth not yet 
appear what we shall be." 

The Growth of the Soul to Full Stature 

" A FTJLL-GEOWlSr man, according to the meas- 
-£*- ure of the stature of the fullness of the 
Christ." The purpose of this is not to make an angel 
nor a giant, it is not to make an exceptional creature 
but simply a "full-grown man," who in his measure, 
for his purpose, and in his place, shall be as full- 
grown, complete, sphered, and developed as "the 
anointed" of God was for his time and in his place. 
It is the imperative demand of nature that we shall 
not stop growing until we are grown. Whatever con- 
tributes to this is of value until the "body fitly 
joined together and compacted by that which every 
joint supplieth, maketh increase of the body unto 
the edifying of itself in love." And the proof of 
"the truth spoken in love" is found in the body built 
up of love. 

Who Would Find God Must Look Within 

THE Christian world has been taught to lean on 
supports ; upon the priest, who must have had a 
heart and a brain because constituted as men are ; up- 
on the Church as the organized institution of religion; 



H /IDessage for HII Souls 109 

upon Scripture that was made within the human 
soul. The Spirit of God could make itself known 
only unto the soul of man. We have been taught to 
lean from the upright upon these subsidiary, supple- 
mentary, secondary supports, and so for the higher 
things we do not trust the nature of man, but ex- 
pect by some magical process to have supplied from 
without what we trust as natural in every other de- 
partment of human life. There is no without. He 
who would find God, must look within. Learn to 
believe the cry that comes from your own nature. 

We Front the Stars 

[" F God is the only life ; if all the processes of the 
■*■ world are the expression of his energy, He has 
been building through the generations, the millen- 
niums, the likeness of Himself. There is nothing 
to make things out of but God. He is the Eternal 
Substance. It is not enough for Him to have made 
the sidereal universe. It is not enough for Him that 
He should have made the great panorama of earth's 
successive stages. When all the processes eventuate 
in the moral sense and a moral soul, there is nothing 
for it but to keep on until it reaches its source. 
Celestial gravitation is its destiny as earthly gravita- 
tion was its origin. Our feet are on the earth, but 
they are not fettered. Our place is upright, so that 
we may front the stars. Our spirits have an upward 
look and all their relationships have their permanence 
in being purged of the earthy and informed with the 
heavenly. 



no H /message for HU Souls 

Our Destiny is Upward 

WHEN it was said to Moses : "See that thou make 
all things according to the pattern that I showed 
thee in the mount," it was the invitation to make his 
highest moment permanent. It was the invitation to 
make the incidental and the occasional natural and 
continuous. It can only be achieved by informing 
each moment with a new meaning and perpetuating it 
for a reason other than exists in itself. The thing 
least regarded is inseparably related to all that is. 
Each thing is the threshold to some vast chamber to 
which we are invited; and each approaching avenue 
reveals a vista of wide sunlit spaces into which we are 
beckoned. Our destiny is upward. The lift is under 
us, so that there is no pressure in life that seems to 
the devout soul equal to the assurance that "under- 
neath are the Everlasting Arms." 



Xife's purpoae 



Life is a long crawl upward, with no flags flying/ 
Do not wait till you get a good start. Appropriate 
each vision, glimpse, belief, help, joy. 



H /IDessage for Hil Souls 113 



PRAYER FOR UNDERSTANDING 

WE seek to be near to God this hour. Thou art 
never far from every one of us, but we wrap 
ourselves about with disguises that do not belong 
to Thy children, and wall ourselves up in dreams, 
and separate ourselves from the nearness of God 
and the sweet companionableness of Thy spirit. 
We pray to be delivered from this folly and fault 
this hour, that we may know we have great rights 
in God, and high privileges in our Father's house, 
the world in which we live; that we may come to 
Thee unafraid, since Thou knowest us from the 
dust we were in Thy hand to the souls we are that 
speak Thy name. Thou knowest us altogether, 
why should we fear Thee, or hesitate to come unto 
Thee. 

Give us a quiet spirit, that, however we may 
have sinned we may have peace, and however we 
may have gone astray, we may know Thou art un- 
moved except to follow us in every wandering. 
Accustom us to thinking of Thee as unchangeable 
in love as in power and to believing that we can 
not fret Thee to impatience, or separate ourselves 
from Thee by any barrier Thou canst not break 
through, or that Thou canst not burn away with 
the fervors of Thy love. 

We pray that this hour may be sacred to us, 
that, as we read the lesson of the past we may 
make just application of it today; that we may feel 



114 a flDeggage for BU Souls 

that we are priests and prophets of a holy religion, 
and may know what is the priesthood of the com- 
mon life and the kingship of the sons of God. 

We pray Thee for those who do not understand 
themselves and think they are not understood of 
men or of God. Grant them repose, and that they 
may wait patiently for Thee. Grant unto those 
that have special temptations that they may know 
nothing can touch them that hath not touched 
Thee first. Thou dost know them altogether. 
Take, Lord, the unformed words of our lips and 
direct them in the impulses of our life, as they lie 
in the slow-moving of the physical being that Thou 
hast made, and direct to Thy wishes the purposes 
of our days. 

Grant to all the worshipping families of the earth 
this day, the knowledge of the Kingdom of God 
that will surely come, the sense of Thy nearness. 
Accept us in Thy great mercy, and guide us by 
Thy holy spirit. Amen. 



H flDessage tor Hil Souls 115 

There is Nothing to Fear 

WHEN" we are hit hard, we do not fall back in 
despair upon the intervention of high Heaven. 
We gird ourselves anew as one whose armor needs 
tightening for a future call. There is divine com- 
munion but it is not the frightened flight of the 
soul to God: it is rather what happens to the child 
that is hurt. He leans back against his mother, 
knowing that it does not cure the hurt, but it helps 
to bear the pain. There is nothing to be afraid of, 
not of God, — to be afraid of God is to be afraid of 
Love, for He is immediate and near and beautiful ; — 
not of man are we afraid, for he is a fit antagonist 
whom we must conquer for truth's sake; either he 
is a good helper in the struggle, or else he is some 
dear, broken brother whom we must carry a little un- 
til he can stand alone. We are not afraid of life, for 
it is a splendid opportunity to prepare us to live for- 
ever. We are not afraid of death, for it does not hurt. 

Discovering the Laws of Life 

HE discovery of "the reign of law" made by mod- 



T 



ern science was long ago affirmed by the students 
of the soul's true life. Life can not be pieced to- 
gether; it is not a mosaic but a creation. This power 
to discover the laws which control life is given to the 
man whose heart is set upon reality. The old condi- 
tion still holds good, "If thou wilt enter into life, keep 
the commandments." We sometimes think we will 
walk surely if we trust serenely to our aspirations 



116 H /IDessage for HU Souls 

and faithfully heed the prophecy of our inmost spirit. 
Aspiration, indeed, keeps the head lifted and the 
affections ready for their upward flight. The laws 
of life come to experience by constant experiment: 
the secret is not revealed to us in our dreams. The 
Prince of Mystics said : "Think not that I am come 
to destroy the law and the prophets. I come not to 
destroy but to fulfil." 

It is thus always in the orderly development of a 
true revelation: the prophet stands on immutable 
law while he tells his vision. To the end of time, it 
shall be the law and the prophet — restraint and as- 
piration — which shall constitute the centripetal and 
centrifugal forces which hold sound life to its ap- 
pointed orbit, true to its course, but true also to its 
center. Much power is wasted by forgetting that 
principles are the stuff that life is made of. We 
try to be consistent when, if we had once for all en- 
tered into an alliance with some law of life, each 
word and deed and thought would find its place 
obedient to this regnant law. All the contending, 
disturbing processes of thought and feeling find 
their place to him who has discovered a principle of 
action, a principle which his reason approves, his- 
tory vindicates, and to which his affections can make 
a pure consecration of the best that is in him. 

The Enrichment of Life 



T 



HE first business of life is to use life's functions 
so as to lead to the higher life. Verily, this 



H Message for Hll Souls 117 

subtle thing we call life demands our best attention : 
that we shall enrich life, not enrich its circumstances 
simply ; that we shall not simply gain knowledge but 
education — that is the distinction we must make in 
the field of mind; that we shall not simply have a 
flood of emotions, but a regulated tide of desire ; that 
we shall not simply hold in the hand what the palsied 
hand must let fall, but hold in the human spirit 
what is part of the divine life of our souls with God. 

What is it to Love God? 

THE good man who loves God in a church is he 
who would be very much without God in the 
desert. The love of God is not a circumstance and 
in a certain sense is not an emotion. It is the aban- 
don of the soul, as all love is that is worth the having. 
It is the projection of the entire nature upon its 
object, the passion that moves as a steady wind of 
desire, as a rising, unebbing flood of the tide. That 
is love: all else is its counterfeit. Is it your experi- 
ence that you have loved God so? that what God 
counts good, you count good ? If that be so, I think 
you will answer, "I also know that all things work 
together for good, to them that love God." And how- 
ever your love abandons itself to God, keep step ! 
Move with His motions, be rhythmic to the beat of 
His life; let your pulse register the tides of His 
being, for He is "above all and through all and in 
you all." 



118 H /iDessaoe for Hii Souls 

The Eight Emphasis in Life 

YOU have not any business in life except the 
growing of a human soul ; I do not say that this 
is the chief business ; I say that this is the only busi- 
ness. Getting a living is incidental; being decently 
clad is incidental ; gathering the household about you 
is incidental; pursuing some line of business enter- 
prise is incidental; but the only thing essential with 
which you have to deal is that which enables you to 
say that from first to last, you have been steadily 
accumulating power in the center of being. That 
is the only business in hand, and the man who does 
not realize it has simply placed his emphasis in 
the wrong place in life. Nobody knows what the 
soul is; we only know how it behaves. Nobody 
knows what electricity is; we only know how it be- 
haves. It behooves us to give as constant attention 
to the behavior of that which constitutes the soul as 
we do to some force of nature that we desire to en- 
slave to do our errands. 

The Three Great Announcements 

WHAT is the sum total of effect of the good news 
that Christ proclaimed? It may be resolved 
into three elements. His first announcement was that a 
human soul may he at one with God. This is Christ's 
first good tidings; that coming up from the lowest 
condition, placed howsoever he may be, by whatso- 
ever conditions environed, engaged in whatever task 
that is decent and good, a human soul may be en- 



H /l&essage for Hil Souls 119 

compassed by God, as a human body by its atmos- 
phere. What did He say? "My Father is greater 
than I" and immediately, "I and My Father are 
One." It was the statement that moral coalescence 
between the God who made him and the being whom 
He made was possible and that our wills might march 
with His, keeping step; and our love might flame 
towards His, until it joined the great, purifying con- 
flagration of His affection. 

The second great announcement in Christ's gos- 
pel is the good news of the self-sacrifice that is na- 
tive to the soul that is at one with God. I imagine 
that in some way that great self-abnegation out of 
which the worlds were made, that surrender of God's 
life that came into blazing planets at their birth, is 
felt by the consecrated soul who gives himself to the 
creation of divine things in life. This power in man 
to give himself away is the correlative of that func- 
tion that is peculiar to him, that in all creation alone 
he may be disobedient. So also in all creation he 
alone may give himself away. The human soul at 
one with God has the power to bestow itself as God 
bestows Himself upon the world. The soul is not a 
cistern dug to be filled by reluctant rains ; it is a liv- 
ing fountain fed from the high hills of God. 

The third great announcement in Christ's good 
news is the supremacy of the human spirit above 
all its conditions. It is said, "we are sons of God." 
It is not enough that I shall mark my little round, 
making the circle of my tiny span of life, and lying 
down to be forgotten in the dust. I want to live for- 



1^0 H /iDessage for Hil Souls 

ever with Him whose life I share and who, having 
brought me into being, can not repudiate me now if 
He would. By virtue of a kinship that is his own, I 
claim my rights in God. This is the great deliver- 
ance of the spirit's power over all its circumstances, 
its lift above its conditions, the fact that it is not 
blind but may see; that it is not simply bruised 
against its limitations but may be set at large; that 
it is not simply captive with the manacles of some 
untoward circumstance but that it may look heaven- 
ward until it can mount hither. 

The SouVs Consecration 

SINCE this gospel of Christ is good news indeed, 
there is only one thing for you and me to do; 
to tell the good news to every man we meet, either in 
lives of grace and goodness or in speech, that shall 
not so much intrude as it convinces and persuades. 
The consecration of the human soul is the purpose 
of our days. The news is so good that it becomes a 
test of the complexion of our days. Is the thing you 
are doing keeping you from that union of God 
which is the soul's estate ? Is the thing you are doing 
or the circumstances that surround you hindering 
you from bestowing yourself upon others than your- 
self ? Is the thing you are doing or are the circum- 
stances that confront you preventing the soul's lift 
above its condition? Then by that test know that 
for you the judgment is set, the decision is rendered ; 
that thing which you are doing is not of God. It is 



H /iDeasage for HI1 Souls 121 

the test of our behavior that we show ourselves fit 
messengers of God's good news. 

The Uses of Liberty 

ALL the world is ours to use, and growing out of 
this conviction in the human mind arises the 
fact that our liberty is not construed now in terms of 
freedom but in terms of power. What is the use of 
strength ? — to turn into work. The man who simply 
exhibits his strength as an athlete is entertaining; 
but he can not be considered permanently useful un- 
til he puts it into the world's work. His strength is 
to lift, to push, to lead, to rally the weak by the 
strength of the strong and to help them, where unled, 
they dare not go. What is the use of liberty? Lib- 
erty is for the sake of life, power, holiness, devotion. 
We must be free that we may be all that we can be, — 
not simply free. 

The horse that is running in the field, unbroken, 
— the floating mane and streaming tail and the fine 
action of the clean limbs and glossy sides, — is beau- 
tiful in his freedom of movement, but the poor cab- 
horse is doing the work of the world infinitely better 
by comparison, because he has learned to go in har- 
ness. We must be free in order that we may put our- 
selves under conditions. By the limitations of the 
old religion we were prescribed conditions under 
which we might work another's will; but now we 
have learned that the use of liberty is for the sake 
of power and freedom and force for the world's work> 



122 H /iDessage for Hli Souls 

by the use of our own wills. The will of God is re- 
flected in the nature of each man as His revealing 
to that man, whose answering will turns its power 
on the world's work. 

A man knows whether he is a clean man or not. 
He knows whether he is dealing with things in a 
shifty way or not. He knows whether he is shuffling 
and shifty in the attitude he has toward life. It is 
not worth while for a man to live who has a debate 
with himself forever, who has to arrange all the 
things he has ever said or thought before he can say 
the next thing. That is a farce without being in- 
teresting. The secret of the directness of Jesus was 
that He had no debate with Himself. When they 
said to Him, "Shall we pay tribute to Caesar or no ?" 
He said, "Show me a coin." They showed Him a 
denarius. He said: "Whose image is this?" They 
said "Caesar's." Then He said, "Eender unto Caesar 
the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things 
which be God's." 



The Passion for Righteousness 

T) E GIN" by putting the emphasis in life where it 
■*-' belongs, in due proportion. Begin by dealing 
with yourself in terms of absolute sincerity, and then 
add to that a passion for righteousness that shall leave 
you a believer in the essential righteousness of the 
universe. A passion for righteousness is the very es- 
sence of faith, — a faith that is represented in the Be- 
atitude as "hunger and thirst for righteousness." 



H /IBessacje for Hll Souls 



Looking back over the century that has been a century 
of emancipation, fronting the century of promise, give 
the weight of your faith to the idea of being faithful ; 
give the emphasis of your mind to the Ultimate Keal- 
ity that is the sum and substance of the life of the 
universe ; give your love and labor to that ; believe at 
least one thing profoundly and follow it to the end. 
We can not commit our work to God without get- 
ting a firmer, two-handed grip on it ourselves. We 
can not cast our work in the world on God, however 
heavy for us or how little. We need never cease to 
pray, but also "we must work the works of Him that 
sent us, while it is day." If any divine help is to 
reach us, it must be brought to us at work. At most, 
we may stand like the peasants in Millet's picture, 
taking their hands from the implements of their 
humble labor only to rest a moment and bow their 
heads, while the angelus rings out over the fields of 
toil. 

Not the "Work, but the Worker 

J"T is not the work done in the world which has 
-*■ first consideration, but fulfilling our destiny as 
workers in the world. It is a fine declaration of Car- 
lyle : "Work out that thing which God hath wrought 
in thee." There is no obligation laid upon you to do 
a great work, but to do the greatest that you can. Our 
work is not necessary to the world ; there is that in us 
of greater worth, — ourselves. What is demanded is 
not our work but us, in all our powers. We are to 



1^4 a ZlDessage for HU Souls 

hold back no part of the price when we bestow our- 
selves on the life of our time. 

By painful growth, by slow degrees, we get our 
view; and it is not simply a delight to the soul 
which apprehends it, but it is an opening for work 
given to the soul that has anything to do in God's 
world. This is the story of the mystic and the prac- 
tical Christian. The mystic sees the vision and is 
absorbed by it; and the man of applied religion sees 
it and takes up his burden and goes to make it his 
own. It is said of Jesus that He came back, after 
He had healed the sick and spoken the good news 
of God to the little town where He had been brought 
up, and called his dear mother and the household 
together and they all went into the synagogue. Here 
He took the old record and opened it for the lessons 
of the day, and said, "I have come, as my custom is, 
into the synagogue on the Sabbath and I read to 
you the word of Isaiah, 'The spirit of the Lord God is 
upon me/ " He could catch and hold the evanescent 
and make it permanent— the conscious presence oi 
the spirit of the Living God. 

Religion An Experience 

WITH devotion to truth, with the adoration of 
goodness, with the endeavor for character that 
is safe because it is sound, we come to those who are 
struggling. What is the exaction upon them ? There 
are just three particulars. The first is that religion 
is an experience and not a theory. It is a conscious, 



H /iDessaae for Bli Souls 125 

deliberate, constant realization of communion be- 
tween the soul and God. If that were not known by 
thousands in all the churches, then the Church would 
have ceased to be effective. The second particular is 
in the fact that responsibility is focused on man. 
The system that relieves man of responsibility de- 
frauds him of moral power. The third is that you 
shall look out for the other man. There is no room 
for anyone who is self-centered and focused on his 
own affairs. 

The Sacrament of Service 

YOU are not free until you are free to give your- 
self to the communion and help of those who 
need your help. I can not conceive of any better 
than Jesus of Nazareth ; yet, "as his custom was, He 
went into the Synagogue on the Sabbath day" and 
interpreted the Word of God unto those who waited 
to hear. When you get so strong you can stand up 
straight, you are strong enough to help some crooked 
person straighten himself. When you are so firm on 
your feet, that you go on your own path unassisted, 
take somebody else by the hand and lead him. When 
your vision is clear, let your ministry be to the pur- 
blind people of the world with whom your associa- 
tion now becomes, not a duty, but a vast privilege 
and a great delight. No man is free and large and 
strong to whom the sacrament of service and the as- 
sociation with the less strong has not come to be a 
dear delight of his daily life. 



126 H flDessacse for Hil Souls 

The Love of the Other 

THEEE is no room in life as in nature, — where 
everything is related and nothing stands alone, — 
there is no room for the man who is only taken up 
with himself. "Thou shalt love the other as thy- 
self." I doubt whether any human being ever knows 
God in any saving and powerful way who has not 
known man in some intimate and sympathetic way. 

It is true of all life that the radiance and joy of 
our inner experience is in the very ratio in which 
we entertain high ideals. The human soul that in a 
large, strong, intimate, and real way deals with things 
as they are, because the soul is struggling toward God, 
finds its heaven here and its divine communion lasting. 

The Search for Truth 

THEEE is a very good definition given of the true, 
the good, the beautiful. "The true is what is, 
the good is what ought to be, the beautiful is what 
is as it ought to be." How far we are from demand- 
ing what is — rather asking to hear what we can bear, 
to see what we ought to gaze upon, to walk by paths 
that are safe. When we realize this, then the pas- 
sion for truth comes as an almost impossible ideal. 
And yet the fact is the only infallible thing in the 
world. The search for the thing that is, as to the 
soul, as to soul's endeavor, as to the will of God, as 
to character, makes a demand that is difficult, if our 
interest is in the living of the higher life. The 
higher life is the human life; carried to infinite 



H /IDessage for Hll Souls 127 

extension, you get Christ; carried to its infinite pos- 
sibilities, you get the humanity of God. 

The New Worship 

TT^OR the most of us God's outdoors in the open 
-*- weather is good enough and we need neither 
heaven nor hell of the old proportions, nor yet a God 
of the old, revolting type, "to make us feel." The 
eternal compassion, the unfailing goodness of God, 
is not enthroned remotely and alien from man; it is 
simply in the world of rational faith; kindled in all 
its emotions by unfailing affection, it is enthroned 
in every worshipping heart. A new deity needs a 
new worship, so much larger is the fact of God; and 
prayer must take on an adoration which the old type 
of supplication would not allow; and praise must 
sound in terms so great that its old feebleness shall 
seem like the plaintive echo of spirits in prison long- 
ing for light. 

The Effort of Growth 

WHY should the apprentice make infinite blun- 
ders in his craft ? Why should the artist strug- 
gle through years of preparation? Why should the 
medical student find the utmost difficulty in getting 
anybody to let him make his experiment? Why 
should any of the crafts and skills of life come only 
by infinite struggle, outlay of effort, mind and exer- 
tion the most strenuous and insistent, and why should 
the religious life, which is the science of manhood, 
the splendid achievement of the human soul, — why 



128 H message for BU Souls 

should the religious life come easy to people who 
six days out of the week are plunged in a bog of 
daily duties, and come out on Sundays to sun them- 
selves for an hour? 

The Tone of the Instrument 

WE must see to it that we have due regard to the 
wholesomeness and soundness of our own na- 
tures. It is too much said that we must not think 
about ourselves, but live a free, natural life. This is 
the inevitable reaction from that older habit of mor- 
bid self-examination. We are told that we must lead 
our lives the best we can. But how are we to know 
what is the best we can, without some self-knowledge ? 
There must be self-examination, not morbid, but sin- 
cere; not with eyes turned upon ourselves alone, but 
turned also upon the high standards of ideal char- 
acter. As it is the business of a man to see to it 
that he is in good health, so he must have a care of 
the temper and tone of his nature; for his useful- 
ness will more depend upon the tone of his mind 
than on anything his mind is likely to produce be- 
sides. The instrument in the musician's hand may be 
of material selected with greatest care by the maker, 
but it is for the player to see that it is well strung. 

The Simple Best 

"OHE hath done what she could/' said Jesus of 

^ Mary. The grace and beauty of her simple 

act had come to her as a possession of the soul, while 



H Message for HU Souls 129 

she sat at the feet of the Divine Teacher. When plans 
fail, when disappointments intervene, when ambi- 
tions come to nothing, what can console a man bet- 
ter than to have it said, that he did what he could? 
And what can reduce our false standards to reason, 
or make our plans accord with what is natural, or 
set our will in harmony with that great Will — what, 
in a word, can so sustain a man's endeavor, and tide 
him over the risk of failure, as to be in very truth 
intent upon a complete self-development? Then 
nothing shall be able to dull the temper of the soul, 
nor make Tiis tone ring false. Such a task is be- 
coming to the sons of God. 

A New Attitude Toward Life 

LET us not be too anxious to enter by that door 
only over which is written, "Know thyself!" 
Nor may we be terrified as by some vision which 
speaks to us as the oracle of Oedipus, "Mayst thou 
never know the truth of what thou art!" Nor will 
we stand fronting Nature and only say, — 

"Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the crannies, — 

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, little flower. 

But if I could understand 

What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

I should know what God and man is!" 

When the naturalist has pulled the flower up by 
the roots, he has not discovered that which fed the 
roots. There is a more excellent way. The Beloved 
Son in the moment his soul was torn with the agony 



130 H Message for HU Souls 

of coming death, said : "This is life eternal, that they 
might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ, whom Thou hast sent." 

The Larger Life 

WE would be "clothed upon, that mortality might 
be swallowed up of life." The purpose of this 
day and hour, and every day and hour, is to live the 
larger life; so that little by little, more and more, 
there shall pass upon us that subtile change in which 
the carnal shall be transfigured by the spiritual; in 
which the mighty gusts of even our basilar passions 
shall be led up to new uses. As common air can be 
transformed into music when the instrument is fit, 
so from the ground of our nature where we begin, we 
ascend to higher levels, where mortality shall be 
swallowed up of life. 

Workers with God 

""ITY Father worketh hitherto, and I work," must 
-"-*- be the motto of His children, in a world as 
yet incomplete. Surely there is fine work to be done 
by those who will be "laborers together with God." 
It is God who worketh in you, both to will and to do. 
It is not true that any earnest and religious man 
works alone. How can one work alone in a universe 
which God fills? From that first struggle within 
humanity, out of which the moral sense arises to that 
finest revelation of God as love, which is the hope of 
the world, there is one palpitating Creative Energy 
carrying forward the triumphs of the truth. Let us 



H /Message tot BU Sculs 131 

jealously covet some share in the purpose of great souls 
and their great Ally ! "I put thee in remembrance 
that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee." 

To the Glory of God 

THERE is a way of doing business "to the glory 
of God," and if it is not done in that way it is 
a reproach to the man of affairs. Who gave you the 
mind with which to think ? Who gave you the heart 
with which to feel and the energy with which to 
achieve great enterprises of the business world? 
There is but one source, — it is by the inspiration of 
the eternal Spirit that you have all these things. 
Shall you trade for yourself and "dicker" for your- 
self? Shall you indulge in the petty immorality of 
business for yourself? K"o man who is worthy to 
bear the name that Channing or Theodore Parker 
or James Martineau bore can fail to see that he is 
serving God at his counting-house as he is serving 
God in the church. 

The Perfect Will 

HOW often the definitions of things have changed ! 
How often theories have been revised! How 
the constant visions have shone on, while men specu- 
lated beneath the stars! How the constant tides 
have risen and fallen, while our little ships went 
out to sea and found their graves, often in the deep, 
and the relentless tides rolled on! How the con- 
stancy of the world, how the order of its march, 
how all things that change not, await our discovery 



132 H fl&essage tor HU Souls 

and are patient for our coming! Whenever we try 
life's meaning, the Will that underlies it is patiently 
abiding our coming. With added reverence the same 
mind, instructed this way, says "the perfect and 
adorable Will of God." 

Seekers After God 

MEN" turn to the ideal to save themselves, that 
they may not solidify to the center. They 
dream dreams and see visions; and it will ever be 
written of each successive era, "In that day I will 
pour out My Spirit upon all flesh ; and your old men 
shall dream dreams and your young men shall see 
visions, and upon my sons and upon my daughters 
will I pour out My Spirit." So that human nature 
is at one perpetual task, the inquisition of the uni- 
verse to know what it means. It has been kept at 
its task by the idealizing tendency of human nature, 
by virtue of which we have passed out of the brute 
condition into the human and seek more and more 
as we aspire to be human souls. 

Disloyalty, the Worst Word 

WE have as fundamental to our thinking the idea 
that every man's life is a plan of God. This 
is not an atheistic world; it is not a world in which 
any part of our work can be done alone. The great 
purpose of life is to do with contentment whatever 
the Divine Will appoints. It is of no concern at all 
what you do; but the manner and style of doing it 
are of great concern. I am only concerned that it be 



H /IDessage for Hll Souls 133 

something that shall be creditable to my Maker. The 
honor of the Maker is in the hands of his creatures; 
the dreadful thing about sin is not simply that it is 
sinful, not at all that it shall be punished — no noble 
man who sins, even by mistake or indirection, would 
wish to escape his punishment or have any one else 
pay his debt — the dreadful thing is that a being, 
who was made in the image of God, and into whose 
keeping God put his work, should be disloyal — the 
worst word in the language! 

Seeing what He Sees 

WHEN we attain the height where Jesus stands, 
what shall we do ? We shall gaze a moment on 
the beauty of His face, and then we shall try to 
catch the secret of the transfiguration. They said 
who companied with Him: "Lord, it is good for Ho 
to be here: And let us make three tabernacles; one 
for Thee, and one for Moses and one for Elias," 
scarce waking from their sleep. He roused them 
from their dreaming and took them down where, 
frothing and writhing, the insane child lay in its 
father's arms. The transfiguration is not for our- 
selves alone, but for the sake of those who need our 
light. We come down with Him, having seen what 
He sees and felt what He feels. This it is to know 
the secret of Jesus Christ. 

The Peaks of Abstraction 

WHEN" thought lets go the hand of the "Infinite 
Ally/' then it is no longer robust ; and like the 



134 H flDesgage for HU Souls 

great forest of the stuff that things are made of, it 
may blossom, or cling as the vine clings to the rocks, 
against the wind; or may spread itself over the hard 
facts of existence, soft as the moss over the rocks. 
But at last life and vigor can do no more, and the 
cold peak of a cheerless speculation, giving no sign 
of life, surmounts all, and death reigns supreme. 
From such heights of sheer abstraction we some- 
times hear a cry, and know not whether it be the 
articulate speech of a living man or the call into. the 
deeps of space of a human spirit that has lost God. 
As thought climbs its heights, as it gains wider out- 
look, it must go hand in hand with the recognition 
of its infinite relationships. The consciousness must 
penetrate it of that Eternal "with whom we have to do." 

No Escape from Life's Problems 

"f\N every height there lies repose." In the deep 
Vy places of life there is peace. But the way to 
the height is arduous, and the way to the depths is 
stifling and storm-beaten. We must gird ourselves 
for a hard climb if our way is upward; and if we 
would go below the surface of life, we must sub- 
merge ourselves in the affairs of our kind. We must 
know the soul's most intimate life and share its real 
experiences. To refuse to do this brings a temporary 
peace, — a respite from struggle but it brings an 
accumulating burden which will fall upon the empty 
life when its strength is gone and joy is dead. Let 
no one suppose that life's problems give us up be- 
cause we refuse them attention. The solution awaits 



H Message for Hil Souls 135 

us, however long delayed and will be complicated by 
the perplexities growing out of our own neglect. If 
we do not judge ourselves and control our life, we 
will be called before an inexorable tribunal in some 
moment of crisis and may find, under a searching 
inquisition, that we have forgotten the language in 
which true souls make answer at such times. 

Confronting the Unexpected 

ONE of the sure indications of the will of God in 
an ordered world is found when we are con- 
fronted by a condition we have not procured; which 
we have not invited nor laid plans for. When such 
a condition presents the sheer, abrupt sides of a cliff 
on which is no footing — only a bird could wing its 
way above them and perch afar — then let us lift up 
our hearts, for lo, here is the will of God. There is 
nothing else to do, and if you are a living man, in 
God's name, do that. The sooner we accept the con- 
ditions that are inevitable as part of the Will that 
can never be unkind, the sooner we will organize 
out of our defeats victory and out of our dismem- 
bered thinking a better philosophy of life. 

The Inevitable Choice 

SOMETIMES the will of God comes as an inevita- 
ble choice. Then the inconsistency of our 
minds appear in that we are discontented that we 
have to choose, and we say: "If somebody would 
only tell us which course to follow." The pleasant 
things flaunt themselves and the stern, long deter- 



136 H flftessage for HIl Souls 

mined course is on the other side. The allurements 
are on this side and the obligations there. I have 
made my covenant concerning certain fidelities, cer- 
tain obligations growing out of the relationships of 
life and this covenant constitutes the standard of an 
inevitable choice. When that choice is made, it is 
to be remembered that a man has to answer to him- 
self, and it is an awful thing to be on bad terms 
with one's self. 

The will of God sometimes follows an inevitable 
course. It does not appear to us as the will of God. 
It just appeals as the bare necessity of life. Now 
what shall we do in the face of it? Most people 
answer: "There is only one thing I can do. I 
thought I was a free agent but here I am face to 
face with an inevitable course." What they ought to 
do is to thank God that there is only one way; for 
they are saved the perplexities of cross-roads when 
there is just one trail that stretches before them 
though it seems to end in a morass or a sheer cliff. 
It may be when the cliff is reached it will go gently 
over the edge to other levels that seem precipices 
from afar. 



The Passion for Self-Respect 

THAT man can not go far wrong in the integrity 
of his thinking with whom self-respect is a pas- 
sion. Self-respect is not consistent with beggary, 
self-respect is not consistent with folly, self-respect 
is not consistent with prodigality; it is only consis- 



H fl&essage for HU Souls 137 

tent with the rounded and sphered condition of the 
soul in its integrity. My first business is with my- 
self because my last business is with myself ; and the 
man who ignores the claims of his own nature to be 
heart-whole and strong, has to live with that un- 
formed thing, that deformed thing which he has pro- 
duced. Our errand however far afield it goes must be 
an errand of one loyal to the powers of his own nature. 

The Power to Bestow Ourselves 

THE power to give ourselves to something, to be- 
stow ourselves, not only argues teachableness 
but is the instrument of courage for the rest of the 
world. It is a great thing to be able to take people 
at their best. There is always a best in every human 
creature. The people that are impossible are of the 
fewest possible. They may be difficult; so is the 
passage across the morass from tussock to tussock 
where the foothold may be gained ; but when you get 
beyond the submerged land, you are in the full cur- 
rent of the river. There is no morass without some 
stream running near: so there is always a best in 
every human creature. The purpose of life is heart- 
ening one another, putting ability to go on into a 
discouraged spirit, and nothing serves so well as an 
appreciation and admiration that is as delicate as it 
is sincere; and as kind, as it is patient. 

"We are saved by our admirations." What is 
meant by the power of admiration? It involves 
first that function which marks our humanhood, the 



138 H /IDessage for HU Souls 

power to give ourselves away, to let ourselves go. 
Man's distinctive function is the bestowal of himself. 
He is not simply a savings-bank of energy; he is a 
bank of deposit for temporary safety, until he can 
draw upon himself for the uses of life. The busi- 
ness of the strong man is not to show his form, but 
to lift. The business of the wise man is not to show 
his mind, but to teach. The business of the good 
man is not to wait for his halo, but to go out and 
distribute whatever goodness he has at command, sus- 
pecting very little in himself of good. The business 
of life is distribution; and admiration is the sign of 
the capacity in us to do that. Our center of gravity 
is not in ourselves but in any other whom we admire. 

The Investment of Power 

THE whole attitude of life, to save yourself from 
loss of power, is to invest power in some other 
human life or some thing. The souPs business is to 
wait and hear what the Lord will speak, and He 
speaks by every admirable thing in life. "Man shall 
not live by bread alone" said the great Master of 
the art of living, "but by every word that proceedeth 
out of the mouth of God," and his accent is multi- 
form, his emphasis various, his dialect infinite, and 
the terms of his persuasion every admirable thing 
in life. We are to be taught when we think upon 
anything that is lovely and gracious: "If there be 
any virtue or any praise, think on these things !" I 
assure you I reverenced the woman who was crying 



a /iDessaoe for Hll Souls 139 

herself sick before Dore's picture of Christ leaving 
the Praetorium. To me it was impressive; to her 
it was absorbing as she gave herself up to love and 
sacrifice. 

"The Way is Narrow" 

THEEE is that constant problem, — my own being 
and its meaning. I can not deny I am. I 
ought not to be careless what I am to become. The 
forces of circumstance, passion, and nature, are ply- 
ing me on all sides. One must be curiously exempt 
from the common lot, if these forces do not present 
the risk of degradation to him or constitute the chal- 
lenge to virtue. The task of self-development is 
set us; the responsibility of moral influence is laid 
upon us; the fact of sin obtrudes itself through all 
the disguises of feeling. Each must say to himself, it 
is certainly true that I am a man beset with tempta- 
tion, crippled by limitations, arraigned by moral du- 
ties, and confronted by daily tasks. Is there nothing 
in this to make a human soul struggle? The way 
is narrow which leadeth unto life ! 

The Risk of Enterprise 

|"T is not my purpose to make the impression that 
■*■ I regard life as a sad reality. It can only be 
this when no human love is at work upon it to make 
it better and stronger and sweeter. To the man who 
knows its value it is an opportunity, a joy, and a 
privilege; but we need not take our joys superficially. 



140 H flftesgaee for HU Soulg 

They are not like cut flowers, but like plants rooted 
well and pledged to a constant bloom in their season 
of bloom. Life is a great deep, and its resources 
are discovered to those who do not fear to launch 
out into it. A man must be willing to take some 
risks who would find a path in the deep. Enterprise 
has its risks as well as its rewards. Moral enterprise, 
no less than that which enlists so much of our 
strength and intellect, must take all life in its hand, 
ready to lay it down. 



IReltflion 



Religion and Life must not be two things. Life to be 
worth while must have Religion; and Religion to be 
worth while must be translated into terms of 'prac- 
tical living. 



H jflDessage tor Hll Souls 143 



PRAYER FOR COMMUNION 

WE come, God, to worship before that great 
love that hath called us children and taught 
us to say, " Our Father." give to Thy children 
to know the great rights they have in Thee, and 
what unfailing love from Thee. May the faith- 
fulness from God inspire our fidelity and the pas- 
sions of God toward us awake in us compassion for 
the world of God that waits upon our effort. Grant 
to us that we may be like Thee, not simply find 
Thee like to the thing we think, and that we may 
grow more and more to serve the great ideals that 
have their realization in Thee. Grant unto us such 
appreciation of Thy great hospitalities, such con- 
sciousness of the unbounded goodness of God, — 
the eternal goodness, — that we shall find our- 
selves in the fellowship and communion of God. 

Let Thy people in every place this day gain 
some access to Thee that shall mark a new growth 
in them, gain some nearness to that great center 
of light that shall cause their darkness to dis- 
appear. May those who are weary rest in the Lord 
and wait patiently for Thee, and those that sit 
under the shadow of bereavement know there is 
no death with the living God, and those that have 
burdens that seem more than they can bear cast 
their care upon the Lord, so that they and the 
burden may be carried together. 



144 H ZlPessage for HU Souls 

Grant in this hour the cleansing of our eyes and 
sanctification of our affections. Let all those that 
have need of Thee know Thee near, and all those 
that have wandered hear Thy voice saying, " This 
is the way, walk ye in it." So let our heaven 
descend, and all our wants be met, and all the 
longing of our hearts, like a prayer, be also like 
gladness, in the consciousness that Thou hearest 
us always. Bring Thy kingdom, and let Thy will 
be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Amen. 



H /IDessage for HU Souls 145 

New Motives for Religion 

THE new motives for religion shine by contrast 
with the old motives, in that the religion of today 
repudiates fear. Love, casting out fear, grows to 
fill the place which was occupied by fear and turns 
to do the duties which fear could not do. It is 
not afraid of life, for it is not so much a probation 
or a discipline as it is an opportunity and a delight. 
It is not afraid of life's tenderest and purest rela- 
tionships, "for in their face do we behold the Eter- 
nal." It is not afraid of the consequences of sin; 
for since they can not be escaped or evaded in any 
world, religion declares for life dedicated to the will 
of God. Of sin it is afraid as one might fear a wild 
creature not yet tamed. When upon our common 
life fall its common sorrows, we do not fear that the 
hand of God is on us. We rather believe that under- 
neath us are "the everlasting arms" and we "commit 
our souls in well-doing unto Him as unto a faithful 
Creator." 

Thus the man whose religion has become a daily 
dedication to the will of God has put away 
from him, as irreligious in themselves and tending 
to irreligion, all motives that are grounded in self- 
interest and in distrust of the order of God's world; 
all motives that are simply regulative and a com- 
promise with the weakness of the baser nature; all 
motives that shut the soul away from immediate 
communion with the fatherhood of God; all motives 
which separate and estrange the brothers of the race ; 



146 a ZlDessaae for Hit Souis 

all motives which separate life into secular and 
sacred, present and future, earthly and heavenly. 
The man who thus dedicates himself to the religion 
of today finds in its newer, clearer, stronger motives 
abundant compensation for what may seem a loss to 
those less devoted to reality. This is the religion of 
Jesus of Nazareth ; this is the experience of the soul. 

The Right ening of Wrong 

FIEST of all, religion declares its object to be 
the adjustment of human relationships, "the 
making of the world a better place to live in." It 
is first ethical, then spiritual. It finds more of God 
in the Tightening of wrong than in the mystic rev- 
eries of a secluded sanctity. For this reason in all 
the churches the life of the Man "who went about 
doing good" places the beautiful pictures of the Beat- 
itudes so constantly before reverent eyes that already 
the pure in heart begin to see God, and to see Him 
unconfused by any theory of his being or conflict 
of his attributes. Eeligion is so busy bringing in 
the kingdom of man, making it, as the Son of man 
declared it should be, the very kingdom of heaven, 
that we have been much turned away from settling 
nice questions of the administration of God in this 
world and the destiny of God's children in any world. 
We have thus put the duty of religion into the pres- 
ent tense, and have made the "stern daughter of the 
voice of God" more than the echo which it must be 
to the Pharisee of any age. 



H /IDessage for Hll Souls 147 

The Inner Eye 

A CONVICTION of reality is one source of the 
inspiration of the prophets and the scriptures 
of the past. These prophets had power to deal with 
things that were "not seen," as though they were still 
within experience. They spoke of the inner eye; they 
declared that the eye which sees is not the eye of 
the Seer; but that the inner eye is fixed upon that 
which is more evident to it than any demonstration 
to sight. There is to the prophet's eye an appearance 
that does not appear to the common man; as in the 
definition of Martineau: "The prophet is the man 
who has discovered to what heights of divinity he 
must look up, and upon what adamantine manhood 
he must take his stand." The sense of reality made 
the prophet the real man. It is his sense of reality 
of the unseen which appears in that statement with 
respect to Moses that "he endured as seeing Him who 
is invisible." 

Character is the Test of Religion 

THE test of a religion is in the character it pro- 
duces by virtue of what the soul gets out of it. 
The Fatherhood of God, infinitely fatherly; the sense 
of communion that nothing can interrupt ; the experi- 
ence of heaven here and now; the consciousness of 
the forgiveness of sins, which has been provided for 
between the soul and God, with no mediator between ; 
— these are elements that are easily transmuted 
into character, for their very essence involves the 



148 H /l&essage tot Bll Souls 

sense of personal responsibility. The test of religion 
is to be found in the character it produces by virtue 
of what is believed. 

The Reality of the Unseen 

THE inspiration of religion in the past which bred 
prophets and made scriptures is due to the fact 
that between this reality of the unseen and the man 
himself, this inspired man could establish a relation. 
He was not simply a looker-on at realities : he estab- 
lished divine relationships. So that his history was 
not simply his story of that which was in plain sight, 
but that which also he felt. Besides this, there was 
in the prophet of old a power of abandon to these 
realities. The whole relationship of the man to his 
environment, of function to its field of exercise was, 
in the prophet, a sense of God. Not only was this 
true, but there was an abandon — a letting one's self 
go — to the full currents of religious inspiration. 

The New Inspiration 

WHAT is the new inspiration for religion? It is 
a call to communion with God. We read now 
with a meaning more intense and beautiful than ever 
before that splendid One Hundred and Thirty-ninth 
Psalm : 

'^Whither shall I go from thy spirit? 

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? 
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; 

If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. 



H /iftessage for BU Souls 149 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 
Even there shall thy hand lead me, 

And thy right hand shall hold me. 
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; 

Even the night shall be light about me: 
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, 

But the night shineth as the day." 

The splendid reality of the souPs experience is 
found in a more intimate communion and deeper 
sense of God. 

If religion does not add zest to life, then it fails 
so far. All people who understand religion as adding 
zest to life, put their lives into the world; they 
do not simply put the world into their lives. There 
is no relation between a ship and a barnacle. The 
only thing to do with the ship after the voyage, is 
to bring her into the dry dock and scrape the bottom 
and leave these parasites of the sea on the dry land 
where they will die. All non-producers for the com- 
mon weal are simply stuck on to the world's progress 
— carried, dragged about. 

Since religion is nature at her highest and 
human nature at its best; since religion is a pas- 
sionate devotion to the will of God, and finds that 
Will written on every page of the Book of Life, it 
is not something that is to comfort me when I am 
at my lowest; it is something to hearten me when I 
am at my busiest. Eeligion is not a raft shoved out 
to a sinking man, but it is the clothing of the mind ; 



150 H /IDessage for Hll Soulg 

it is the blood which goes through the veins; it is 
the heart of courage that is beneath all other things ; 
it is the zest of every day's experience. Thus there 
is a distinct heightening of the courage of the human 
soul under the new inspiration of religion. The 
splendid courage of modern thought concerning God 
is embosomed in the thought that this universe, which 
is Himself, flames with that Inner Life which we 
have discovered to be the light of God. So the man 
who believes in God in the terms of the modern 
thought says, there is nothing in God's world to be 
afraid of. And of the future, his utterance is such 
a word as Emerson's, "All that I have seen of God's 
work, in the world, leads me to trust for that I have 
not seen." No wonder he was so assured. Let me 
call to mind the things you do not understand, and 
then say whether you will give them up. 

Workers Together with God 

RELIGION is no longer a secret told to a few 
which, under proper conditions, they may tell 
to a few more. But now, under the open heaven, in 
the undimmed light of God, in a world so large that 
more than a billion worlds are known to modern 
thought, infinitely extended in space, indefinitely ex- 
tended in time, marvelously elevated in cause, the 
man of God waits to hear God's will. He is confi- 
dent that in a world so crowded he shall not be for- 
gotten, since now there is a divine Providence that is 
the Soul of the atom as well as the Creator of the 



H /IDessage for Hli Souls isi 

man. He is sure that in a world where all "are 
workers together with God," he shall not be idle ; for 
fit work waits for him, being fit to do it. He is 
sure that he need not carefully and niggardly stint 
himself in his activities, for there is a commission to 
the humblest and the greatest to promote the work 
of God. 



Religion a Personal Experience 

I BELIEVE in God, but that is not enough. I 
must believe God: that is personal relationship. 
When we speak into the ear of the Most High, we are 
not crying into the void. All definitions of philos- 
ophy are incomplete. The relationship between the 
soul and God is a relationship that must be per- 
sonally realized, personally believed. No knowledge 
of tradition is a substitute for it, and no delight in 
tradition can take its place. Nothing that any hu- 
man soul can do but the abandon of itself unto the 
Infinite can be called in any sense the passage from 
traditional religion to religion that is personal. Ke- 
ligion is not a theory but an experience. Eeligion 
is not a guess but a certainty. There are the- 
ories manifold but they are not religion. The soul 
is an explorer for reality and its exploration is its 
experience and its experience is its life : this is re- 
ligion. 

To teach religion is not to teach its definitions, 
Can not the living soul that knows a thing show 
how it knows it without defining the terms in which 



152 H /IDessage for Hil Souls 

it knows it? The prescription is not the medicine; 
the theory is not the fact; the definition is not re- 
ligion. I do not say that definition is not useful. I 
do not say that when you want to draw a line around 
things, you have not to define them; but the survey 
of a field can not be a substitute for the crop you 
can get out of it. To teach religion but one thing 
is to be considered, namely, the giving of direction 
to the temper and spirit of the taught. It involves 
a crystalline sincerity. This is the first step. It 
involves an ear hospitable to every voice that has 
anything to say that means good — this implies a 
teachable spirit, an open-minded hospitality so that 
light may enter into the mind, 

Eeligion is not a theory; it is an experience. Its 
definitions are theoretical; but men do not live in 
definition. Men fight over definitions; they grow 
rabid about definitions. The only corrective to that 
insanity is the common experience of divine reali- 
ties. Men understand one another who speak the 
language of the spirit, who never could understand 
each other when speaking the language of specula- 
tive theology. Men understand one another who 
can pray together; just as men with the blazon of 
the cross before them marched from every part of 
Europe, speaking every language of the western 
world, to rescue the sepulcher of Christ. They ful- 
filled the splendid phrase of one of the Fathers of 
the Church who speaks of the "expulsive power of a 
great affection/ 3 



H /IDessage for HU Souls 153 

The Creeds or the Beatitudes 

THEKE is not in any creed, so far as I know, a 
statement of personal religion. I do not know 
in one of them anything that can be paralleled with 
the Beatitudes which deal with life and its blessed- 
ness. The creeds deal with thought and its accuracy ; 
and between the blessedness of life, the beatitude of 
experience, and accuracy of statement, there is all the 
difference between the rosy child that is so full of life 
your arms can scarcely hold him while you love him, 
and the placid and statuesque perfection of the dead. 
"The soul divines what is divine" translated into 
our modern statement becomes, "That is inspired 
which inspires." It is our relationships that mat- 
ter. Better give one's self absolutely to worship than 
to be eminently wise about idols and go from one 
pedestal to another until one's fancy is pleased. That 
is not worship — that is not devotion; that is not 
religion. 

"Man for God" 

A CONDITION" contributing to religion is a sense 
of common purpose, namely, "man for God" 
as the instrument of his manifestation, as the me- 
dium in which He works. Does the sculptor take 
the clay; does the painter take the pigments; does 
the musician wish for his instrument; does the great 
violin-maker say God could not make it without him ? 
"We are workers together with God." We are not 
the only product of God's creative power, for He has 



154 h flDessage for Hil Souls 



never stopped creating, has never completed what 
He was doing. He has left us some little fragments 
of work that we may do in a world which is not yet 
finished. If the universe is not yet finished, it be- 
hooves us to have a share in the making of it. Every 
shiver of an earthquake is testimony to the cooling of 
the planet not yet cooled enough for man's safety. 
We have our contribution to make ; and religion that 
is not "man for God" has missed one essential ele- 
ment in it. 

Religion is not Easy 

NOT only must the student of religion have a 
crystalline sincerity and a teachable spirit, but 
earnestness. Men demand easy religion. Nothing 
else is easy in life. Ask a man what anxieties cor- 
rode his mind, what solicitudes perplex him, what 
embarrassments impede him. He will tell you there 
is no life that is easy, and it ought not to be. As in 
the natural world, the struggle is the process of sur- 
vival, so in the moral world, it is "struggle of soul 
that saves." Finally, there must be an unselfish de- 
votion. Without teachableness, we have no advance; 
without sincerity, we have no self-knowledge; with- 
out earnestness, we have no momentum ; without un- 
selfish devotion, we have no usefulness. Whatever 
you acquire in the name of religion is only taken 
to your mint to be put into the current coin of the 
realm. It must go into circulation thereafter. 

I have no interest in easy religion. Easy thinking 



H /IDessage for Hil Souls 155 

is apt to be foolish thinking. Easy ethics is either 
morals turned loose, not tightened as to the purpose, 
or else it is small moralities. There is a great mass 
of people in the congregations of the Christian 
churches who are best satisfied when there are being 
peddled out to them small moralities. The religious 
life should be difficult in its thinking, difficult in its 
purpose, difficult in its struggle to the point where it 
is victorious in some phase of experience and from 
that time on that phase of it, at least, becomes easy. 
The religious life, to be worth while, ought to be 
difficult, not because it is unnatural, or supernatural, 
but because it is natural. 

The Impact of Personality 

rilHE teaching of religion depends, most of all, up- 
J- on the impact of one nature upon another. Over 
and over again, teachers in Sunday School say: "I 
remember a teacher whom I had in my early boyhood 
or girlhood. I can not remember more than her 
name. I do not remember anything that she ever 
taught me; but somehow or other, she made me be- 
lieve that God was real and that God was known to 
her." That is the impact of one spiritual nature on 
another. That is essential in the teaching of religion. 
The most brilliant discourse is as vain as the most 
flippant language, unless the discourse carries with 
it the sense that the man has contact with divine 
realities; — the Fatherhood of God, the leadership of 
Jesus; the dignity of human nature; the direct ap- 
proach of the soul to God, immediate and alone. 



156 H message for HU Souls 

Root, Flower and Fruit 

WHERE a man gives his best and bestows him- 
self utterly; where he converts his best into 
the coin that is current, for the uses of his life, there 
he worships. Religion, in its essence, realizes its 
aspirations in worship, and its obligations in obedi- 
ence to law. It has its root in human nature, its 
flower in human emotions, its fruit in human con- 
duct. Its end is the regeneration of society, in which 
the full-grown man shall appear as the normal 
product. 

The Invisible made Visible 

RELIGION" deals with reality. There must be an 
ultimate reality. W^ not only live in a world 
of effects, but we live in a world of ordered being 
which argues a design in its structure that can not 
be of itself. God has ordered it that we shall not 
fly but walk, and a step at a time; that we shall see 
the things invisible through the lens by which they 
are made visible; and just as we turn the telescope 
into the blank fields of space where no stars appear 
to the naked eye, and they then hang out to our eye 
blazing worlds, so the whole reality of the world 
shows to us through the medium of the things that 
are. "The invisible things of God since the creation 
of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through 
the things that are made, even his everlasting power 
and divinity " 



H /iDessage for Hil Souls 157 

Elementary Principles 

THE soul belongs at home with God. The soul is 
an effect that argues a cause that is like itself. 
Does it love ? Then it was born of love. Does it think ? 
Then thought is the mother-stuff of which it was 
made. Does it struggle ? It is only pulsing with the 
life that is in the world and never ceases its pulsa- 
tions. You hark back ever from the struggle of the 
soul to its source in God. Why do I recite these 
elementary principles of the philosophy of religion? 
Because I come across people over and over again to 
whom religion is a theory and not a reality ; to whom 
it is a tradition and not an experience ; to whom re- 
ligion is an experiment of which they soon grow 
weary; to whom religion looks for its authority to 
some good man, or good word, or good service or 
good impulse within the soul, and does not follow 
it back to its source in God. 

The Ultimate Reality 

THE business of religion is to realize God, and in 
terms of that realization register the relationships 
of life. To realize God, — not to speculate about 
God ; not to theorize about God. The business of re- 
ligion is to make real, to find God as the Ultimate 
Eeality ; having so found the terms of our life in Him, 
to find the terms of our life with our fellowmen. 
That is the reason that when the great Master of the 
art of living was asked, "Which is the great com- 
mandment in the # law ?" He declared, "Thou shalt love 



153 H message for Ell Souls 

the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all 
thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy 
strength. This is the first and great commandment. 
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments 
hang all the Law and the Prophets." If He had 
never said another word, He would have made the 
race his debtor by that deliverance. 

Religion a Natural Faculty 

FROM those whose lives are perfectly comfortable 
and peaceful has not come the cry for the living 
God. Eeligion as an experience is not necessary for 
the comfort of people so placed. But it is absolutely 
necessary for the development of people so placed. 
We are not developed by our comfort, we are cheered 
by our delights. We are developed by the athletics 
of the soul, and for that development religion, as an 
experience, is as real as the function of any organ of 
the body is real in its relation to the field of its exer- 
cise. The soul seeks exercise and it has a field upon 
which that exercise must be expended. The develop- 
ment of the soul of a man is essential, if he would 
really be a man. Eeligion is a natural faculty, in- 
herent in our being, and the effort must be made to 
adjust itself to those relations that are to the soul 
normal, natural, and necessary. 

Religion's Contribution to Art 

BY virtue of religion all art, in its appeal to the 
aesthetic nature, has its share in religion. It is 



H /iDessage for ZUl Souls 159 

safe to say that without it, three things would never 
have been for our edification — the great works of 
sculpture and painting; the great works of architec- 
ture, where religion was enshrined ; the great musical 
works, most of which we should not have had but 
for the contribution of religion to it; and the Latin 
and Greek classics. When Cassiodorus was secretary 
to the Eastern Emperor in the sixth century, he found 
on his hands a lot of monks whom he set to work 
copying the Latin and Greek classics, which were 
thus preserved to our age. This is the service done 
by religion as a servitor of man, creating and pre- 
serving art and literature in an age when the learned 
of art were to be found only in the churches of 
Europe. 

The Means of Growth 

THE whole problem is to use the means of growth 
until we reach the place where we can find God. 
"He is not far from every one of us," says the apostle. 
The story of the religious life is simply the story 
of discipline, of training, of usage, of habit, of in- 
stinct, of intelligence, or reason, until at last it dawns 
upon the human soul that where "he faltered, now 
he firmly treads;" and where he cried "like an in- 
fant in the night," the true Light shines for him and 
every means of growth has been his, from seeing the 
Eternal in the faces of his friends to that rapt com- 
munion of the soul with God where all intervening 
media are dropped out. It is like climbing by slow 



160 H /IDessage for Ell Souls 

processes, along difficult ways, to some great height 
from which one at last looks out. 

The Walls of Christianity 

ALL religions put together do not constitute re- 
ligion. Eeligion is native to man. It is a 
function of the human soul. It has for its exercise 
the natural field of the life of the human being. 
Christianity is one of its aspects, which is for us an 
inevitable aspect. You can not by any process, born 
as you are, derived as you are, eliminate from your- 
selves the Christian influence. You may declare 
yourselves not Christian, you may be rebellious 
against it, but you must do it in terms of sin. You 
may imagine yourselves Buddhists or Moham- 
medans, or this or that thing which has become a new 
fancy to your speculative thinking. You have only 
put a Buddhist or Mohammedan tracery upon the 
walls of your thinking, but the walls are laid in the 
origins of Christianity, as they belong in the life of 
the Western world. 

The Two Sacred Piers 

WHEN Browning was asked by Canon Farrar to 
say what in his poems best expressed his faith, 
he answered, "He, at least, believed in soul, was very 
sure of God." So God and the soul are the two 
sacred piers in religion, from which all efforts in the- 
ology have attempted to spring the arch of a bridge. 
All the history of religion is an effort to lay down 



H Message for HU Souls i6i 

a road-bed over the gulf supposed to exist between 
God and the soul. On this way the soul would 
travel over and find God; and if it be true that God 
is "seeking those to worship Him, who worship Him 
in spirit and in truth/' then it is thought that God 
might come over by this way to the soul. Eeligion 
is an experience. The definition of religion is the 
property of the intellect; the essence of religion is 
shared by the soul with God. 

Love, the Reconciler 

¥E are told that God and man must be made one, 
that there must be an "at-one-ment." Look at 
the story of the Prodigal Son. See the son coming 
"from a far country" ragged, lonely, sick, starved; 
and "when he was a great way off," his father saw 
him — why? because he was watching ever in that 
direction, with all the instinct, all the subtle wire- 
less telegraphy of love. "And his father ran and 
fell on his neck and kissed him." The son was 
stopped in his confession, for love needs no confes- 
sion or explanations. And the family was called to 
rejoice, "for this my son was dead and is alive again ; 
was lost and is found." There was nobody needed 
to reconcile the father and the boy. There was 
no need for a mediator, so Jesus taught, when Love 
wanted to welcome Sorrow. 



162 H message for HII Souls 

Converse with Reality 

THE emphasis, if laid on doctrine misses alto- 
gether what life means. What is doctrine? It 
is a more or less accurate definition of how one man 
interprets religion to another man. "Why do you 
worship and whom ? What do you believe and why ? 
What are the motives of action and how did you come 
by them ? What is the experience of life in its high- 
est terms?" Immediately there must be definition. 
But when a man comes and says, "You have not the 
right definition;" it is like one who has found a 
new star by the telescope being accused by another, 
who has been working on the matter mathematically 
to see where the star ought to be, that he has not 
shown the formula by which the star was discovered. 
The mathematician says to him, "You can not give 
the definition; you can not give the formula." The 
other man turns to him and says, ''There is the star" 
Statement, definition, opinion, all change, and human 
life goes on calmly ripening its experiences, develop- 
ing its powers, and assuring itself by converse with 
reality. 

The Religion of Jesus 

THE religion of Jesus is an Asiatic religion, but 
it is the only Asiatic religion that seems to fit 
even approximately the occidental mind. We have 
not adjusted it well. But the very ethical passion 
out of which it came; the very sense of God that 
was the essence of it; the ability to say, "God is a 



H /IDessage for Hll Souls 163 

spirit: and they that worship Him must worship 
Him in spirit and in truth" fits the largeness of 
our purpose, fits the adoption by us of modern 
thought, is a complete vindication of the theistic in- 
terpretation of the universe, for which all thinking 
minds in the Western world now stand. "God in all, 
above all," through all, is at once the utterance of 
science and religion. Out of a Jewish mind it came, 
inoculated by Greek thought, set at large by spiritual 
enthusiasm. 

Emotion in Religion 

WE do not decry emotion in religion. If it were 
not for emotion we would have few prayers and 
no hymns. All hymns are born of spiritual emotion 
and prayers are wafted upon the aspiration of the 
soul's outbreathing. Its inspiration comes to it and 
it breathes again unto high Heaven the thing which 
has been inspired in it. But when all has been said 
and done, in religion as in life, it is reality that 
counts; it is constancy that is dependable; it is the 
marriage of the soul to an abiding principle that 
remains. We reach God by the affections; it is not 
possible that any religion could be purely intellectual. 
The business of religion is to make life so well 
worth living, in the religious man's estimation, that 
he shall hunger in heart to make it more worth while 
to the other man. In the last and final statement, 
Keligion has this for its guarantee, in the words of 
Martineau, that "for all time the difference must be 



164 H message for Bll Souls 

infinite between the partisan of beliefs and the man 
whose heart is set upon reality." In the man whose 
heart is set upon reality you have the registry of 
fewer emotions, but when all the effervescence has 
subsided, when all the quick breath of adulation and 
praise and adoration has gone by, he shall be found 
abiding, as one who has found "the shadow of a great 
rock in a weary land," — his "heart is set upon 
reality." 

Religion Must be Rational 

RELIGION in its last analysis must be rational; 
that is, it must be made up of these constitu- 
ents: there must be an awakened soul to which it 
comes; there must be an alert spiritual nature which 
participates in it and that spiritual nature must in- 
volve the whole man. It is not given us simply to 
feel deeply, but to think clearly on the thought side 
of religion. Many elements are involved in religion; 
intellectual apprehension, motive of conduct, adjust- 
ment of the affections, which is the unfailing source 
of devotion both toward God and man. 

He is a rational being who "looks before and 
after"; who has reasons for his action, motives for 
his behavior, whose affections are the root of his 
principles and whose principles are the regulation of 
his affections, the one the sanctification of the other. 
Eeligion has to do with the whole man ; and religion 
must be rational or else it is superstition. We are 
6et against all superstition. But we examine the 



H /IDessage for HU Souls 165 

myth and the miracle as we examine the fact; for 
the myth is as legitimate, — a flower growing upon a 
fruitful stem — and the miracle — a fruit growing in a 
credulous age, — as any fact that history reveals. The 
myth and the miracle are part of the poetry of re- 
ligion. There is a poetic interpretation of religion 
which is as legitimate as its facts. 

The fact is, there is only one kind of righteous- 
ness that a man can know, — the kind that to 
him is ideal; he sees it in another and he strives 
for it himself. That is the whole problem of life. 
There is no system of vicarious atonement; no at- 
tributing to me of the virtues of another ; no saving 
of my soul by any process that is outside myself 
that can possibly be effective. You will come up by 
soul-force into the life, whatever it is, that belongs 
to the Great Father — the life that is in reserve for 
us; you will come up into it as the seed comes up 
into the summer, because it has the power of fertility 
and life in itself. 

The Object of Religion 

HAT is the object of religion? It is the forma- 



w 



tion of character. If it does that, it is good so 
far as that is done. If it does anything else, not do- 
ing that, it is evil. I do not care how character is 
made, of what stuff it is made, how long it takes, 
what sorrows it involves, what joys it insures, what 
high-hearted hope it engenders, what black despair 
the soul passes through in the process, if in the end 



166 H /iPessage for HU Souls 

character be formed, of which the tests are three: 
First, how does a man feel when he is living with 
himself? Second, how does anybody feel who is liv- 
ing with him? Third, what place does he take in 
the social order and how bear his share of the social 
responsibility? The religion which does that well is 
the religion for that man, whatever it may be for the 
next; for all forms of faith are 

"* . . but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, Lord, art more than they." 

Take your choice between a religion that is meant 
to restrain human nature and a religion that is meant 
to develop human nature. One will constitute a strait- 
jacket which is never used for well people, and the 
other will constitute an inspiration of which one 
would think the world eager to avail itself. You 
cannot regenerate anything by external pressure; 
you must find new life by new inspiration. Eeligion 
is not something to be achieved from without; it 
must be grown from within. 

Natural Religion 

JESTJS was not intent upon self-conviction. He 
never seemed to labor with Himself concerning 
divine realities. He had a sublime self-confidence 
which was grounded in God. He was as sure of God 
as He was of Himself. Being conscious of his own 
unstinted life, He found it easy to believe there was 
no gulf anywhere in life from highest to lowest; 
and being thus sure of his own humanhood and its 



H /IDessage for Hll Souls 167 

guarantees in the infinite Fatherhood, He devoted 
his life to a vindication of the humanity of God. 
The kingdom of God is thus introduced by the Son 
of Man. What is highest, as spiritual, is nature's 
highest also. Religion, in the teaching of Jesus, is 
a natural experience. In a sense, better than the 
term usually conveys, it is "natural religion." 

God Will Not Lose His Own 

THERE can be no night in the human spirit 
chargeable on God except by a philosophy of life 
as false as the Ptolemaic system in astronomy, which 
set the sun revolving about the speck on which we 
live. If the heavens are always radiant, how is it that 
the earth is dark ? If God is love, how is it that we 
so often miss his message and feel induced to doubt 
if He be, not love, but at all? Jesus charges home 
the defect on man. He probes to the very bottom 
of the matter and says : "If the light that is in thee 
be darkness, how great is that darkness !" We create 
our own dimness of vision; we cast our own shadows 
on the path. Some poisonous atmosphere in the in- 
ner world may make the light burn dim; some dis- 
use may have impaired the organ through which you 
look out upon the universe. God will lose none of 
his own, but what his own may lose of God is mat- 
ter for grave thought. 



168 H flpessage for HU Souls 

The Prospective from Above 

IF you were to start through the Adirondack wil- 
derness, threading the forest by indistinct trails, 
crossing the rivers and lakes and ponds, following 
your guide, who never hesitates or loses the way, the 
confidence you would exercise would be entirely desti- 
tute of any mental picture of the country traversed. 
But the whole mental attitude would change, and be 
lifted to great distinctness and vividness of realiza- 
tion, if you should ascend Mount St. Eegis, and see 
the whole region spread out before you like a pic- 
ture. As you marked the familiar lakes and waving 
woods you had traversed, there would come into your 
mind the thought of the similarity of these two ex- 
periences to human life in the appeal of its intri- 
cacies to faith. God sees our life from above. We 
see it too close and too little of it at a time. 

The Relation Between Religion and Life 

THE one distinguishing characteristic of human- 
ity is the power to vitalize with a divine breath 
of life the actions and thoughts which man shares 
with creatures less endowed. The spirit of the time 
is adverse to meditation; a false standard of life be- 
ing fixed upon, the secular temper dominates the 
mind. It is difficult to make men understand the 
relation between religion and life. A man's religion 
is his business in life. It is an exhortation ringing 
false in tone to tell men to carry their religion into 
their business. It ought never to have been carried 



H flDessage for HU Soulg 169 

out, unless it was dead. It indicates that fatal 
divorce which puts religion on one side and common 
life on the other; and life will always remain com- 
mon, until it is spiritualized by a religious inspira- 
tion. 

We talk about the service of religion. All service 
should be religious. The most religious of men said, 
"I am among you as One who serveth." We sur- 
round the table of the Lord, and call the bread and 
wine a sacrament. Is the table about which friends 
gather in the home any less sacred, and should not a 
man's daily duties stir him to sacramental devotion? 
Life is serious. This is the only way I know to 
lighten its load, to shift it from the shoulders of care 
to the altars of daily prayer, and accept it again as 
a commission from the hand of Eternal Love. Thus 
shall we be "renewed in the spirit of our minds," no 
longer doing eye-service, as men-pleasers, but doing 
the will of God from the heart. 

The primitive man builds his altar and lays his 
sacrifice and wearies the heavens with his prayers 
because the Unseen has laid its power upon him and 
he is in the grasp of the Invisible. When he "en- 
dures, as seeing him who is invisible," the progress 
of religion has reached a stage far in advance. Re- 
ligion thus begins in fear and runs the whole gamut 
of human experience until it ends in the souls of the 
holy ones who have escaped from themselves, and 
their fears, to God and his love. 

But most of all, the natural use of religion is to 
regenerate life; to bring us up from the lower level 



170 H jflDessage for Eli Souls 

and make us human; to make that which is unmoral 
in the brute and is immoral in the man, forbidden to 
him because his business is to bring the full-grown 
man into being ; to build up the "full-grown man, ac- 
cording to the measure of the stature of the fullness 
of the Christ." 

Eeligion is meant to make duty a delight ; and wor- 
ship a natural gravitation, a celestial attraction; and 
the love of God, the sublimest aspect of all the pure 
motives of life. The gentle amenities which make 
our homes a sanctuary are but transferred to God's 
universe when we are at home with Him. 

Again, the natural use of religion appears in that 
it provides a philosophy of life that shall lead a man 
to say: "I do not know what shall happen to me in 
all the years to come; but I think, before God, I 
know how I shall behave when it happens." That is 
worth while. 

The Test of Religion 

THE test of real religion is in its very beginning : 
"Does it make him who experiences its power 
love the highest in any sense?" 

And the next step is joy. Joy is the tide, and 
peace is the sea. And the tide ebbs and flows, but 
the sea is always there. Joy is the blossom, peace is 
the root. The blossom falls because it is the time 
of fruit, but the root still bravely holds the stem 
and tells the secret of soil and air and rain and God 
unto the peaceful powers of the plant. So said 



H /Pessage for HU Souls m 

Jesus: "I have told you these things that my joy 
might be in you, and that your joy might be full." 
But He said later : "Peace I leave with you . . . Let 
not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." 
Much confusion about what religion is lies in the 
failure to distinguish between joy and peace. I shall 
be joyful if it is my nature to sing. All peace lies 
in the fibre of our souls, and is the rescue of us when 
joy is impossible. We descend from the heights 
where we have had wide vision and in the quiet places 
recover ourselves, and the spring song passes into 
the hush of summer. The song of the bird to its 
mate is over, because they are so busy now that the 
nest is full. The rippling music of the woods is 
over, but the maternity of the woods has begun. So 
our joy subsides to its quietness and the tide turns 
back and is lost in the sea. 

Difficulties of Definition 

W"E turn to the great exponents of the root 
thoughts of the human mind, and we come 
upon such a definition as this of GToethe: "All re- 
ligions have one aim — to make man accept the inevi- 
table." But there is no delight in that ; and if there 
is any purpose in religion, it must be to add zest to 
life by putting life into right relations, so that that 
which belongs to it shall come to it; so that not 
only shall life accept the inevitable but prepare splen- 
didly for the next stage in life's development. Fred- 
eric Harrison's statement is that "Beligion is summed 



172 a Message for HU Souls 

up in duty." But here we must separate religion 
from ethics and disregard the life of our fellow men. 
We come to feel that a definition of religion is 
necessary. To teach religion, however, be it remem- 
bered, is not to teach its definitions. Eeligion is 
"doing the will of God from the heart; with good 
will doing service/' 

The Experience of Divine Reality 

THERE is only one kind of way to love purely 
and strongly in the world. There is any quan- 
tity of diversities in the theory of what love is 
like, how provoked, what course it may take. All 
this has to do with the definition ; and the world goes 
on loving in its old, plain, splendid, regenerative way, 
as the generations go by. Religion is an experience of 
divine realities. It is not to be had by authority, be- 
cause no human experience can be transplanted from 
one human soul to another. It grows in every case 
from the seed, and the seed is harrowed in by the 
necessities of the spiritual nature, and free inquiry 
and personal obligation are necessary to the mellow- 
ing of the soul that it may be sowed with the seed of 
a real experience. 

A woman who has been in one of the great 
churches came to me and said: "When I came face 
to face with the death of the person whom I loved 
best in all the world, I wanted to know for myself 
what were the issues of life and death." For calm 
weather, when indifference is quite a sufficient equip- 
ment for the soul, authority is quite comfortable, just 



H /IDessage for Hil Souls 173 

as securities are well placed in some bank of safe 
deposit. But when you want to use the thing you own 
as quick assets in a crisis, you must know whether 
it is negotiable in the market, — that is the whole 
question : whether I can take another man's opinion 
for a thing that is tearing the soul out of me ; whether 
a chart that was made in the seventeenth centurv 
is good sailing directions for a voyage in the twenti- 
eth; whether I can take another man's discovery for 
my consolation when I am lost. Authority is not 
a substitute for personal religion. 

I am a part of the bundle of life; I am a thread 
in the infinite weaving where the pattern appears in 
the warp and woof of life. That is true enough, but 
I want to know it. I want to get into communication 
with the vast reservoir which supplies that by virtue 
of which I can enrich my life, reinforce it when it is 
weak, build it up when it is breaking down. I want 
in terms of spirit to be able to do that which is done 
in terms of matter, so that when I am hit hard and 
go down, I shall fall upon that by virtue of which I 
gather strength, in the mere contact, to rise again. I 
want to know in terms of spirit the splendid message 
of Browning: " We fall to rise; are baffled to fight 
better, sleep to wake/' To find this out is the great 
occupation of the human soul, or else, whatever else 
it has done — fortune gained, knowledge gained, in- 
fluence exerted — lacking that, it has made a failure 
of the thing it was sent into the world to be. 



174 H /SDessage for Hli Souls 



GIVE us the peaceful courage to wait in patience 
to know Thee. 

The world is hard, but splendidly hard. The angles 
are sharp, but if we pad angles w T e lose our effective- 
ness. It all keeps us at our best. 

Easy roads lead to weakness; easy faith leads to 
complacency; easy prayer becomes mechanical. 

Prayer is not to bring God down, but to lift man up ; 
not to supplicate for what we want, but to find out 
what God wants. 

When we pray, we do not alter God's mind, but we 
get together the things which belong together, the 
soul and God, and change ourselves. 

We lay our burdens down in prayer to see their in- 
significance from a heavenly standpoint. 

By the grace with which you render service can you 
recommend your religion. 

You can not take from a church what your soul 
is not ready for. 

The worshipping sanctities are in the mind. 

Theology is the guess of man concerning God. 



3em& of 1Ra3aretb 



What is Christian? To be like Christ; to be moved 
by His spirit; to abandon one's self to the will of God. 
It is a state not reached by the speculative faculty, 
but by devout affection. 



H /IDessage for Hll Souls 177 



PRAYER FOR FAITHFULNESS 

OH all-encompassing Sun, whose infinite ray, 
however far it reaches, begins where the soul 
perceives Thee, we are not concerned that Thou art 
infinitely great. We know that Thou must be 
great, since Thou art the sum of being, but we are 
touched to think how infinitely near Thou art; and 
this Thou must be for Thou art the essence of being. 
We celebrate Thy compassion more than Thy glory, 
and are content to think Thou fillest all things if 
Thou dost but fill our need of the moment, and the 
bitterest cry Thou dost answer. 

Hear the covenant we have made this hour with 
Thee, that we may not strain against the barriers 
of Thy love nor be restless within the everlasting 
arms, nor draw ourselves away from the breast of 
God. Hear the vow we have sung to Thee. It has 
moved in the cadences of song, but was born in the 
agony of the human spirit. We pray Thee to for- 
give us wherein we have grieved Thee. We have 
wandered whilst Thy spirit has kept step with 
us, and we have never been far from the invitation 
to go home to Thee. We pray Thee to make us 
conscious of this, for it would be dreadful to us 
if we were only conscious of ourselves and not of 
Thee. We can scarce live the moments and the 
hours as they pass, but we pray Thee that we may 
be able to lift ourselves by Thy spirit which shall 
come into our low places like a tide, and flood all 



178 H /[Desgage for HU Souls 

the ugliness of our shore with the pure waters of 
Thy love. 

Hear us for any that find it hard to be brave and 
do not know how to do the little that they can in a 
large and fine way, as done to Thee. God, help 
them to understand how much it means to be 
workers together with Thee, though they be but 
day-laborers hired for the hour, sent into the vine- 
yard at the last moment. Help them to under- 
stand that the fruit they gather was of Thy plant- 
ing. 

And we ask Thee for Thy grace for the sick. 
There is so much we want to do that we are impa- 
tient when we can not do it; help us to believe 
that we work while we wait, and labor while we 
suffer; and grant that the travail of our pain may 
be the birth of Thy goodness. We pray Thee for 
those who miss their beloved out of their lives. 
Let them know that there is no division between 
life and life, and comfort according to their need 
all those that sorrow. Hear us in Thy merciful 
goodness. Amen. 



H /IDessage for Bll Souls 179 

The Secret of Jesus 

LIFE depends upon principles of action, upon mo- 
tive power. What was the secret of Jesus of 
Nazareth ? What was it that He struck out between 
man and God that made Him the man he was ? His 
beatitudes were not heard from somebody. They are 
to be read in the light of his experience. He found 
them out. They were laws of life to Him. When 
He said: "Blessed are the pure in heart for they 
shall see God," it is his vision that He is telling us, 
a vision ever present to the clear eye and the pure 
heart. He knew, "Blessed are the merciful for they 
shall obtain mercy," from the warm springs of com- 
passion springing up in His own nature. Over His 
carpenter's bench, on the road to Galilee, in the com- 
pany of His disciples, and in the seclusion of His 
own prayerful times, He discovered laws of life. He 
who would imitate Christ does not match his life by 
Christ, but matches his principles of action by those 
of the Christ. 

Christ's simplicity was a final statement of the law 
of life that needed no commentary, so that when we 
read the Beatitudes, we feel that we are reading a 
transcript of his common life. Through the whole 
ministry of His life, His simplicity is its marvel. 
His life and his teaching are crystalline in clearness, 
utterly simple in expression, entirely easy of appre- 
hension. The doing of it is another thing. 

We sometimes wonder that Jesus was so calm, clear 
of vision, direct in his thinking, sure of moral issues. 



180 H jflDessage for HIl Souls 

If we would find the secret of this calm, deep soul, 
we must find the path which led to the wilderness of 
the temptation, where He girded up his strength 
anew. We must seek the path into the mountain 
stillness, where He knew He could find it in the night, 
and where on that height of spiritual vision He re- 
mained all through the hours of darkness. Part of 
his secret of abiding trust He has discovered to us; 
part we must discover for ourselves. All that in- 
truded itself between Him and his work, encumber- 
ing his love until it was not free to spend itself 
unhindered — all this, He cast on God. Going to 
school like a little child in God's kingdom, He learned 
lessons of the lily, the sparrow and the beast of the 
field; and argued that, if "the Son of Man had not 
where to lay his head/' He still stood forth the free- 
est spirit of all that burdened time. 

The secret of Jesus, so often misunderstood (in 
terms of sacrifice, of self-abnegation, of surrender, 
and of incarnation), really was the discovery that a 
human soul might be so related to the Infinite Life of 
all, that it might be so absorbed into the will of God, 
that the human will might be so brought into coa- 
lescence with the will that is Divine, that we might 
he lifted out of death into eternal life. He brought 
eternal life to light by stating the terms from God 
on which it might be acquired. This is good news 
because it is of prime importance, it has to do with 
reality, it shows an established relationship between 
that which is constant in me and that which is per- 
manent in God, and the relationship is permanent. 



H /IDessaoe for Hii Souls 181 

The Joy of the Christ 

LET us turn to the crystalline joy of the Christ. 
The testimony of the New Testament is to the 
joyousness of Christ. And why not ? Shall He be at 
one with God and find no joy? As well say a great 
orchestra may be at concert pitch and have no har- 
mony. As well say that every responding string was 
not liquid music as the bow or hand touched it, as 
to say that One who declared, "I and My Father are 
one/' was not drinking the full, deep draught of his 
perpetual peace and brimming delight from the foun- 
tain from which flows all the joy of the world. 

Jesus, the Lens of God 

THE New Testament everywhere speaks of Jesus 
as a means to an end, not as an end in Himself. 
Hear Him: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the 
Life." Now the Way is a way some-whither ; and 
the Truth is the expression of some elemental fact; 
and the Life is derived from the same source of be- 
ing. "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no 
man cometh unto the Father but by me." Jesus is 
God's lens to shine through ; our lens to look through. 
Jesus is the lens through which God looks — this is 
the mediation between our ignorance and the perfect 
beauty of godliness whose name is God. 

The soul is dependent for inspiration, not for 
rescue. We look to God for revelation; we want to 
have Him made plain. "No man hath seen God at 
any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the 



182 H /iDessage for HIi Souls 

bosom of the Father, he hath declared him/' You 
can imagine all men near-sighted, never having seen 
a star, and then the world coming in procession to 
the telescope and revealing the new heavens — the side- 
real heavens made plain to a near-sighted world. This 
is just what happened in Jesus Christ. Men had not 
any view of God that would satisfy until they learned 
it, apprehended it, had it made plain in terms of a 
human life. That was the lens through which God 
showed Himself to the eye that searched for Him. 

The Divinity of Jesus 

WE believe that Jesus is divine because we believe 
that He was a man at one with God. It was 
He who said, " I and my Father are one," and " I am 
not alone for the Father is with me." This is the 
normal state of the spirit which is at one with God. 
We believe that He is a Savior of men, not by ap- 
peasing God but by revealing God to men. We believe 
that there were wonders which attended upon his 
life, but that they were the inevitable element in 
the history of a great Soul. We believe that we do 
Him more honor, not when we believe all that the 
Gospels say He said, but when we believe those 
words attributed to Him which are like Him, and 
disbelieve those which are inconsistent with the 
sublimity, purity, and majesty of his superb per- 
sonality. 



H flbessaQC for Hil Souls 183 

The Compassionate Christ 

^OHE hath done what she could." This kindly 
^ comment upon a beautiful but simple act was 
spoken by the Master to his disciples not long before 
his death. Jesus was no mystic, rapt away from 
common life; yet He was the prince of Mystics in 
this, — that, when most alive unto God, He was filled 
with a compassion that was divine in its tenderness 
and strength. Transfigured on the Mount, He comes 
down out of that radiant experience to heal the de- 
moniac boy at the foot of the Mount. On his way to 
Jerusalem, with the sound of angry voices, already 
present to his imagination, crying "Crucify Him!" 
He is stopped by the cry of a blind beggar by the 
wayside; providing also for the care of his mother 
and the beloved disciple; turning from them to em- 
phasize the prayer of a dying thief and comforting 
him with a voice tremulous with love and pain. Thus 
do the memories of those who wrote about Him pre- 
serve the sweet assurance that He turned not away 
from his great trial but turned in it to assert the 
divine communion that love has with sorrow. 

The Daily Companionship 

FOR each of us is the daily companionship of Jesus 
a dear and beloved friendship. You and I must 
climb to where He stands. I see Him yonder upon 
the high peaks of human experience; I see Him 
stand. I know there is a path thither, else He had 
not been there. He was not let down from heaven 



184 H /IPessage for HIl Souls 

upon those peaks of human life. He found them 
through the night of struggle and the daylight of 
divine approval and won the heights, to which there 
must be some path. And so we begin our climb 
toward the summit of His Transfiguration, cheered 
by that heavenly vision, and trying for a time to 
forget the wailing of the "demoniac boy" below. 

The Denial of Jesus 

THE skepticism that we dread is not that which 
turns upon some theologic proposition concern- 
ing the nature of Jesus; it is that skepticism of the 
merchant, the banker, the broker, the lawyer, the man 
of letters and the minister who says, "I cannot live 
my life on the terms of Jesus Christ." Very well, 
then, let that be his denial, but never let him call 
himself Christian again. If Christ is of use after all 
these years, He is of use in mercantile and in pro- 
fessional life and in the sanctuary of our homes. 
"Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by 
the things which he suffered; and being made per- 
fect, he became the author of eternal salvation to all 
them that obey him." 

Following the Master 

OUE business is to find at what springs Jesus 
drank; what life flooded in Him; what high 
courage was his own; what secret of simplicity He 
held; what splendid courage moved Him; and then 
say : Since Thy life was all too short, was broken off 



H /IDessa^e for Hil Souls 185 

in the midst and snapped by the pressure of cruel 
hands, Beloved, we will turn from Thy cross, ex- 
pectant, and go our ways to make up that which re- 
mains of the life of Jesus Christ in this our day. 
With free movement and light step, will we follow 
"the grace and truth of Jesus Christ," the Brother 
of those who would live in the spirit. 

The life of the Christ was free from all self-pity. It 
had no morbid self -consciousness ; it had God-con- 
sciousness which engulfed all else. It had no morbid 
introspection, no curious inquiry into its own states, 
no uncertainty as to the permanence of its processes 
and the sublime end to which they were bound. In 
that joy which made children flock to Him to be 
blessed, and women follow upon His path that they 
might minister to Him, the victorious tone of his 
life was the compulsion of all those who came within 
the influence of his ministry. 

The Leadership of Jesus 

WE believe in God absolute. I invite you to faith 
in the revelation He makes of Himself. We 
must find some form in which the abstract may be- 
come concrete. The absolute must make a revelation. 
Jesus declares Himself such a revelation — the revela- 
tion "God has made in his Son." Not in the obscure 
way phrased in dogma, nor in the spectacular way 
expected by the Jew, but a manifestation of spiritual 
verities in the terms of human life, an exhibition of 
eternal attributes as human qualities, a demonstra- 



186 H /IDessage for Hll Souls 

tion of the Infinite in terms of the finite and con- 
crete, "God was in Christ," his anointed, "reconcil- 
ing the world unto Himself." 

The supreme flower of the Jewish genius for re- 
ligion was Jesus of Nazareth. He was a Jew in body, 
in mind, and in motive; a Jew after those sturdy 
defenders of spirituality in religion, Amos, Micah, 
Joel, Isaiah; a Jew appearing in a time of decay of 
spiritual worship to declare that God is a Spirit; a 
Jew renewing the ancient hope of God's kingdom and 
its Messiah, but declaring : "It cometh not with out- 
ward show but is within you"; suspected of making 
innovations upon the ancient faith, but answering 
him who asks for the "greatest of all commandments" 
in the words He had repeated each day in the worship 
of the synagogue in his native village: "Hear, 
Israel; the Lord our God is One Lord. And thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, . . . 
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 

Jesus Christ is the chief corner-stone of religion. 
As Christians we apprehend it, by reason of the 
personal relation between the believer and the Master. 
Dismiss from your minds all theories about Christ; 
remember that the relationships of life are spiritual 
in essence. They are relations of the soul, and they 
cannot be the subject of speculative interest and 
exploitation. Every effort to define the nature of 
Christ is a deviation from the purpose of his minis- 
try to you. Every effort to speculate as to his being 
is to divert attention from what He is to you. The 
relationship is personal. It is the relation of a leader 



H /IDessage for HIl Souls 187 

and him who is led. It is the relation of one who 
climbs steadily up heights of divine experience to 
the guide who has travelled that way before, and 
with whom he stands side by side on the heights. 

The Master of the Art of Living 

I FIND myself impatient and inattentive when dis- 
cussion in any group of men turns upon any doc- 
trinal statement about Christ. I feel as I would if 
some dear friend had been mentioned in a group of 
those who knew him, and they began to speak about 
his place in society, his possessions, the respectability 
of his family, the amount of his trade. It is my 
friend I know, not the accidents of his birth and 
breeding. It is the heart that has been revealed to 
me. It is the inner life that ever appeals to me — 
the inner life in terms of spiritual activity. Let us 
talk of our friends in terms of spiritual excellence; 
and the only way never to lose them is to hold them 
in that relation to ourselves. So it is with this great 
Friend of the race, this Master-spirit of all time, this 
Master of the art of living. He is personal to the 
believer who really believes in Him. 

The Child of the People 

GAUTAMA BUDDHA was a king's son; Jesus of 
Nazareth the son of a carpenter. Buddha went 
out from a palace to proclaim the great renunciation. 
Jesus, with the dust of his carpenter work upon his 
simple garments, climbed the height behind Nazareth 



188 H Message for HU Souls 

to be alone with God. He was the child of the poor, 
the child of the working man, the child of a people 
unknown in Israel, belonging to a race we have not 
learned to appreciate but have only learned to de- 
spise. For fifteen hundred years the people out of 
whose loins He came were harried through Europe 
for the reason (it was said) that they put Him to 
death; and yet the very church that hounded them 
was getting the benefits of his dying by their theory 
of atonement. This child, then, of the poor, began 
at humanity's lowest round to help ns climb, and 
that He climbed to the height of his Beatitudes is 
best realized when we read them in the light of 
human experience. 

The Humanity of Jesus 

IN the relationship between the human soul and its 
ideals as realized in Jesus of Nazareth, we must 
never lose the idea of his simple humanity. The 
moment He has an experience I may not have, I have 
so far lost Him. The moment He holds relations to 
God which I may not entertain, — (I do not say, which 
I do not entertain), — He has escaped my grasp to 
higher levels whither I may not follow. Our poor, 
laggard love follows lame upon the path over which 
His has passed. Our compassions are thin and di- 
aphanous when stretched above the misery of the 
world which His enwrapped. Our tenderness is like 
brutality beside the tenderness of One who could tell 
a woman of her sin and leave her repentant, but not 



a /Bessape for BU Souls 189 

in despair. It would, therefore, be the idlest of all 
speculations to wonder whether human life should 
ever be greater than it was in Him. 

What do we mean by the humanity of Jesus ? When 
He said "Blessed are the poor in spirit," He stated 
what humanity might feel of utter humility. When 
He declared that "Blessed are the meek," He was 
speaking of the blessedness that had come to Him in 
terms of His own profound reverence before God. 
When He said "Blessed are the pure in heart for 
they shall see God," He was beholding in the un- 
troubled waters of his own breast the reflection of 
the stars that were divinely near as He gazed within. 
The Beatitudes of Jesus are to be read in the light 
of his experience. They are human experiences 
and every one of them challenges us; every one of 
them appeals to us with a grip and hold that lifts 
us to its own height, at least in prospective prophecy 
of what we may become. Every one sounds its splen- 
did clarion to our low days. 

Not a Formula but an Inspiration 

TO account for Jesus is not to live with Him. The 
Gospels are a help to knowing Him. They are 
little windows into His life through which we look, 
but we look at it as one looks at the outside of a 
cathedral. He stands outside and looks in, and the 
figures upon the great windows are blurred. Let him 
enter the house of God and look out. Let him stand 
at the high altar and gaze on all sides on the inter- 



190 H /l&essage for HU Souls 

preting world as it makes clear in terms of light the 
thing which from without was confused and unequal. 
That is the difference between thinking about Christ 
and living interior to his experiences in terms of our 
own. We are not given a formula for life, but an 
inspiration; and its re-utterance, its reincarnation, 
its realization is in terms of each life as it is shone 
through by the illumination of a soul. 

The "Mystical Theory" of Jesus 

THEEE are a few unthinking people — people who 
do not read, nor study, nor think things down to 
the ground — who believe that Jesus never existed. 
They might be said not to believe in Christ ; and the 
remedy for them would be to put into their hands 
the argument of an English Ecclesiastic, who applied 
the same theory and system of reasoning to Napoleon 
Bonaparte and proved that he never existed. That 
is the easy answer to those people whose theory is 
based in sophistry and lapse of logic, the assumption 
of premises that are not premises. It only needed 
fresh insight into history, and new study of the gos- 
pels to dismiss the "mythical" theory of Jesus. That 
man would emphatically be chargeable with not be- 
lieving in Christ who admits that Christ existed and 
was just the character described in the Gospels and 
yet deliberately says : "That is not the sort of leader 
I will have." So we must examine the facts. We 
must get at the basis. We must go back to "the law 
and the testimony" and examining the Gospels, and 



H /iDessage for Hil Souls 191 

the Epistles of Paul, and the other related documents 
of the New Testament and the writings of the earli- 
est Fathers of the Church, we must try to set Jesus of 
Nazareth against his own background; to make Him 
not a Greek philosopher, when He was a Jew and a 
peasant and a carpenter; to make Him not a nine- 
teenth century man when He belonged to the first 
century; to make Him what He was by getting at 
what we call "local color" and the atmosphere of his 
human life. That is the first condition and the man 
who attempts anything else, or neglects this and then 
delivers himself authoritatively with regard to the 
life of Jesus, has no standing with students. 

The Apostolic Age 

THE Apostolic Age set itself two problems and no 
more ; it was intent upon purifying society ; and 
it was intent, as a means to this end, on proclaiming 
the Supreme God as the object of worship, revealed 
in his servant, Jesus, so clearly as to make Him seem 
the Son of God, the "only begotten." Vice and poly- 
theism found their antagonists in a faith which pro- 
claimed, "Hear, Israel, the Lord the Eternal, the 
Eternal is One," and then summoned to that purity 
of heart which was to be the preparation to see God. 
This was the essential message of Jesus; the adjust- 
ment of human relationships upon the terms of a 
Love which in God is Fatherhood and in man is 
brotherhood* It was not an age of dogma. They 
were to do God's will, these disciples of the apostolic 



192 H /IDessage for Bii Souls 

age, as a means of knowing any teaching to be au- 
thoritative. 

How We Think of Him 

YOU cannot think of Jesus of Nazareth, except as 
beautiful and strong and courageous. Our ha- 
bitual thought of Him is of a splendid personality, 
a beautiful nature, of a Man whom children cuddled 
to and his hand was placed upon their heads in bless- 
ing; of a man whom women followed from Galilee 
to Judea, ministering to Him out of their wealth to 
eke out the wants of his poverty. We want to think 
of Him always as having no fear, as of sublime cour- 
age. We think of Him as reading the beatitudes 
from the page of his own heart. How did He 
know that "blessed are the pure in heart?" Why, 
simply because He had seen God. 

The Theological Christ and the Historical Jesus 

NO man can realize what Jesus really was unless 
he discriminate between the historical Jesus 
and the theological Christ. We are in collision with 
the people who worship the theological Christ, but 
who will admit that if they had been present when 
Jesus was on earth and had attempted to say their 
prayers to Him, — with his Jewish parentage and 
Jewish training and his abandon to the unity of 
God as expressed in the great Shema which He ut- 
tered every day of his life, — they would have been 
lifted from their knees, while a look of horror would 



H message for BH Souls 193 

have passed over his face to think they should have 
worshipped Him. He would have said to them "Why 
callest thou me good ? There is none good, save One, 
that is God." 



The High Water Mark of Human Life 

JESUS CHEIST is the beat of the Eternal thought 
upon the shores of human life. If the sea comes 
in until it covers the highest rocks on the shore, then 
we know that all the pebbles on the beach are covered, 
also, and bathed by the tide. "Christ Jesus" becomes 
God's way of saying how high the tide of life can 
run! Today, humanity reads here the high-water 
mark which in all the ages the tide of human power 
and life has been recording; and "created in Christ 
Jesus" is thus far the topmost line along the whole 
face of that shore that looks out to the great sea of 
God's inexhaustible life. "The measure of the stat- 
ure of the fulness of Christ" is the commission given 
to man to fulfill in the development of his being. 

I think that after Jesus had spoken and after He 
had lived, and after the records of that sublime ex- 
perience in the terms of our common life had come 
into the world, a new water-mark was made upon the 
shores of time, and the tide has forever since been 
striving to reach that mark. Our spirits lift with 
aspiration, longing to rise upon the shore to that 
height again. By the coming of Christ into the lives 
of men, the meaning of life is permanently lifted. 
More than that: it enhances the power of life: it 



194 H /iDessage for HU Souls 

corrects the emphasis of life: it shows the ground 
of unity of life. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon 
me." "He hath anointed thee with the oil of glad- 
ness." "He hath anointed me to preach good tidings 
to the poor" because the human spirit cannot be im- 
poverished by its condition. It can be enriched even 
in the midst of its beggary, and go its way as be- 
comes the children of a king. 

The Message to the Humble 

THE record of the thoughts of Jesus gives us in- 
dubitable proof that his one purpose was to con- 
vince the spiritual nature of man that it had inalien- 
able rights in the fatherhood of God. Therefore, He 
has no theory of the fall of man, and tells the sublim- 
est truths of his religion — the fatherhood of God, the 
universality of religion, and the spirituality of wor- 
ship — to the humblest and least respectable of the 
common people who surround Him; and He gives as 
his justification that these things are not for the 
"wise and the prudent," — the sophisticated and the 
canny, — but for babes, simple people, who are near- 
est to the naturalness of life. 

In the new motives for religion, we recognize the 
fact that "perfect love casteth out fear ; he that f ear- 
eth is not made perfect." Love is the supreme grace 
of life, — the love of the other. 



H /IDessage for Hit Souls 195 

The Spirit of the Message 

IS the gospel of Christ really good news? In the 
first place, no man has anything to tell who is 
not possessed by his message. The message of the 
meanest messenger, if he trembles with its excitement, 
if he hurries to its delivery, if he is charged with its 
importance, if he is imbued with its significance, — 
the message of the meanest messenger, it becomes 
kings to hear. So the first condition of good news 
is that the messenger be "anointed." There has 
descended upon him that conscious contact of the 
Eternal that has kindled all his powers and lifted 
them to the full significance of their function. As a 
matter of fact his gospel may be good news; but it 
is also good to see him deliver it, because he believes 
it profoundly. That Christ's gospel was good news 
was shown by his own conviction and by its effect; 
for it changed the face of civilization. 

"I Am tie Way" 

IF you will run over the pages of an Evangelical 
hymn-book, the hymn-book used in the churches 
that are really consistent, you will find that a large 
proportion of the hymns are addressed to Christ as 
prayers, or adoration, or tributes of praise. But there 
is not one of them that any early discip"!e could have 
sung. There is not one of them that the Master 
would have approved. They are an affront to the 
truth for which He stood, namely, the adoration of 
the only God, whose revealer He was, whose inter- 



196 H /IDessage for ail Souls 

preter He was, whose expression in terms of human 
life we thoroughly believe Him to be. We try to 
get His view of God, which is a great deal better 
than getting a view of Him and stopping there. 
Many people come to Christ, picture his beauty to 
their imagination, idealize Him, worship, and forget 
that He said : "I am the Way." 

Jesus said: "I am the Way," but a way leads 
some-whither, it leads somewhere. "I am the Truth" ; 
the truth is the expression of an ultimate reality. 
"I am the Life" proceeding from the final life of all. 
"No man cometh unto the Father but by Me." His 
whole teaching is that He is a means to an end, that 
end, the Father. Our effort is to climb and see what 
He sees. No mountain climber ever yet climbed to 
any accessible height where the guide had not gone 
before or knew the way. And when he reached the 
beetling cliffs and stood perhaps on the top of the 
Matterhorn, he drew in his delight in panting, short 
breaths; but he did not stand looking at his guide. 
He gloried in the guide's strength, he rejoiced in the 
guide's skill, he had followed in the guide's footsteps, 
but he tried to see what the guide saw. That is belief 
in Christ; to get his view of God, and of life, and 
of human destiny. 



The "Fall of Man" 

THE churches that have accepted the total depravity 
of man, cannot think of Jesus as really human. 
His character is too beautiful to allow that. They ac- 



H /IDessage for Hii Souls 197 

cept the total depravity of human nature and the story 
of the Fall of Man, to which Jesus never refers in any 
record that is left to us and having accepted it, they 
need the intervention of a Savior to work out an 
atonement, not between them and sin, but between 
them and God. This total depravity theory nowhere 
appears in any gospel in the words of Jesus, — indeed 
every word of his seems to be a denial of the fall 
of man from original purity. It is an absolutely 
blasphemous attitude that our Father should be 
thought One who needs an atonement to reconcile 
Himself to his children whom He has made. 



Relationship to the Apostles 

THEEE is not any reference to Jesus except as 
human in any epistle of Paul, who seems not 
even to have known — at least not to have remembered 
to state — any story of his unusual birth. In the 
Gospels, there is no reference, except in the isolated 
passages in the first part of Matthew and the first 
part of Luke to Jesus as other than human. Mark's 
Gospel, which is the oldest, begins with the baptism 
by John the Baptist, and ends with the burial of 
Christ. Cutting our way through the tangled thicket 
of opinion, with the sharp cleavage of logic or the 
disengaging power of affection and sincere devotion, 
we discover that one statement after another, as to 
how He was God, disappears, until we stand face to 
face with the disciples who dared rebuke Him when 
they thought He was wrong and dared lie upon his 



198 H flDegsage for Hil Souls 

bosom when they thought that He was in trouble; 
who tried to comfort Him as one human soul would 
comfort another. 

God Speaks All Dialects 

GOD spoke the same word to Buddha that He spoke 
to Jesus; namely, the claim of a child of His 
to understand the secrets of the Most High; but in 
Buddha, it appeared as the doctrine of negation and 
the loss of personality; and in Jesus it appeared as 
the constructive doctrine of the Supreme Personality 
in communication with the infinite in man. So that 
though God spoke the same word to his child in India, 
nearly six hundred years before the time of Jesus, 
that He spoke to his Child of Nazareth, it took the 
form of Buddhism as the philosophy of negation in 
the one, and of optimism as the philosophy of well- 
being in the other; just as surely as in the one, it 
was the language of India, and in the other, it was 
the language of Palestine. God speaks all dialects 
and his speech, when it phrases itself, is uttered in 
the terms of its recipient. The channel by which 
truth is conveyed will give form to the truth and 
color its speech. 

What Would Jesus Have Us Do f 

WE try to think what Jesus of Nazareth would like 
us to do. We do not simply ask what would 
He like us to be. I think what He would like us to 
be is to be our best selves, enlightened by his ex- 



H Message for HU Souls 199 

ample, inspired by his spirit. He would like us to 
be our best selves, but what would He like us to do ? 
Dorothy Dix answered that question by liberating 
the insane from their chains and turning the mad- 
house from a place of torture into a place of healing. 
When Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, William 
Lloyd Garrison, together with the good Quaker, 
Whittier, who himself was a believer in the humanity 
of Jesus, asked what Christ would have them to do 
about the slave, they contended for his freedom even 
to intemperance of utterance and action. 

Repeating the Life of Christ 

TO believe in Christ is to repeat his life, not in 
words, but to repeat his life in terms of life. 
There is many a thing that He said that you have to 
take with a difference. As Lecky shows in "The Map 
of Life," you cannot put up over any savings-bank 
the injunction "Take no thought for the morrow." 
You cannot bring into any court of justice the state- 
ment, "If a man take thy coat, give him thy cloak 
also." These are the natural utterances of his time 
and have to be adjusted to the really higher ethics 
of this time. Believing in Christ is repeating his 
life in terms of our life. 

"Ah, none shall see Thee as Thou art, 

Or know Thee for himself at all, 
Until he has Thee in his heart, 
And heeds thy whisper or thy call." 



200 



H message for HII Souls 



JESUS discovered how he could rejoice in trouble. 

The supreme achievement is to give thanks when 
up to the lips in suffering. 

We need religion in terms of soul, an evangel of 
life, not doctrine. 

It is only struggle of soul that saves; it is not the 
thing found, not even God, but the struggle put into 
the search. 

The purpose of the Christian life is to draw a 
parallel with the life of Christ, 

_ In Christ was character in terms of celestial affec- 
tion. 

Dying is easy when we believe in God. 

We can find out what God is only through man. 
Explore the human mind, not Heaven. 

Divine revelation is shown in the accustomed 
things of life. 

It is beautiful to be part of the pattern that is in 
the mind of God. 

The faith of men is corelative to the constancy 
of God. 

The beroic is the only way to peace. The path 
of peace lies in marching to the music of the 

Universe. 



IFmmortaltty 



" The passion for Immortality is the lest proof of its 
existence." 



H /IDessage for Hll Semis 203 



PRAYER FOR PURIFIED DESIRES AND 
BLESSING 

OGOD, to whom we come because the preparation 
of the heart and the answer of the tongue are 
both from Thee, prepare our hearts for Thy sow- 
ing, that the harvest of Thy choosing may spring 
up. Answer the thing that we speak to Thee, if it 
be best for us; and so prepare our hearts that we 
shall know how to forego the thing Thou dost 
withhold. Grant unto us such courage and con- 
stancy that we shall be brave to think we also 
shall come before the Compassionate. So purify 
our hearts that we shall not desire the thing that 
does not go to the very center of a divine affection. 
Make our love to Thee so deep and real that when 
we love Thee we shall worship, and that loving 
Thee so we shall be able to love even the unlovely. 
Search our consciences that they may be acquitted, 
rebuke our vanities that they may be ashamed. 
Teach us how to transmute Thy bounty into bless- 
ing, and to make our dire experiences the strength 
of life. Let nothing seem too much for us to do 
if it is Thine appointment, nor anything seem too 
much to bear if it be bestowed by Thy hand. Give 
us such confidence in Thee that we shall turn away 
from the wonders of Thy world to behold the won- 
ders of Thy grace. 

Grant unto Thy children in this hour, wherever 
they may be, to be commissioned anew of Thee, to 



204 H Message for Hll Souls 

stand in the stead of Thy Christ, to be ambassa- 
dors for Thee though it be in the garment of sack- 
cloth. Give us to know the meaning of our jour- 
neys, and make our paths plain, for we are like 
little children that know not how to go out or come 
in to the House of Life. Great Companion, give us 
Thy company. 

Grant to the sick through the fever and the pain, 
the ministry of Thy holy spirit, and to all that 
minister to them such wisdom and steadfastness 
that they shall seem to receive every healing thing 
from Thy hand, and to know how to move upon 
the paths of health for those that have dropped 
upon the road. 

Grant Thy presence to those who are troubled, 
to those who are in distress that they have not in- 
vited and burdened with burdens they have not 
stooped to place upon themselves, and most of all 
to those who are shadowed by affliction, in whose 
home there are vacant places that they can not 
fill, and in their hearts great sorrows that seem to 
have overshadowed all their joy. Be with them 
all, Thou great solace and comforter of Thy chil- 
dren, and draw them to Thyself. Amen. 



H /IDessage for Hil Souls 205 

There is no Fear of Death 

THERE is no fear of death. We shall go down, 
saying, " Yea, though I walk through the valley 
of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." Why ? 
Because there is no evil in God's good world. Death 
is not known to the vocabulary of Nature. Change, 
Nature knows, and continuance, but no death. And in 
the future, I think a welcome waits us as it waited us 
at birth. We shall go out in that great struggle of the 
birth that is to come ; and men shall say, " He is dead." 
What they shall say who are waiting for us, I do not 
know ; but it must be as much better than this life as 
its anticipation is higher than the mere fact of birth. 
Ever upward God's creations move. Ever upward 
God's progressions tend. "Let not your heart be 
troubled, neither let it be afraid." 

Consciousness of Life the Ground of Immortality 

NO proofs of any kind are anything but secondary as 
compared with the life of God in the soul of 
man. " This is eternal life ! " There is no substitute 
for it. It is the consciousness that was phrased in the 
New Testament that the " Spirit witnesseth with our 
spirits that we are the children of God. If children, 
then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs of Christ." 
When I find ten thousand people who say that some- 
thing has come into their experience which gives them 
the reason to believe that they have "passed from 
death to life," that " old things have passed away, and 
behold, all things have become new," that " now there 



206 H /ifcessage for ail Souls 

is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus/ 5 
that the whole process of life has for them been en- 
larged, so that it seems a new experience, I think it is 
the part of the scientific mind to believe that the testi- 
mony of consciousness is worth at least credibility, 
and may be the basis of common experience. 

All the instincts of the race touching the meaning of 
life fly one way. It is the instinct of the deathlessness 
beyond death — the passion for immortality. One 
thing upon which this passion is based is the conscious- 
ness of life. This is my possession. You are not sane 
and normal if you cannot go out on a radiant morning 
like a child, and fill your lungs with God's good air, 
and turn your eyes to the glint of God's good light and 
thank Him that you are alive. The man who comes 
and says : " I can prove to you that you will not live 
forever" finds that the stress of obligation rests on. 
him. How does he know? Did he ever die? Does 
he live in the part of him that is going to die ? Not 
at all. If he lives at all well he lives in all that part 
of him that he believes in his inmost nature is not 
touched by death. The consciousness of life is the 
first firm ground on which the passion for immor- 
tality steps in its upward look. 

I am conscious that I live. Let him prove who can 
that I shall die. Consciousness is the consciousness of 
life, full, pulsating, delicious. The burden of proof 
that it shall end rests on the man who is in love with 
death. For me, for you, it is life that we believe in ; all 
else is its incident, and nothing more. God has or- 
dained this world after a beautiful fashion. 



H tfDessage for Hli Souls 207 

The Dead Live to Us 

IF death is the end of lif e, this is an irrational world, 
and the mere play of forces is no longer interest- 
ing. They have no end, no object: there is no last 
term : life's ascending series ends in death. I doubt, 
however, if anybody ever lived — any human being, 
in the highest sense — who could believe that his friends 
were dead, — realty believe it. We may be harried 
by the fear of death. We may be panic-stricken by the 
stroke of it; we may not dare to take upon ourselves 
the responsibility of deciding the condition upon 
which it appears, but when we are alone, the dead 
live to us. It is onlv those who have loved un- 
worthily or lived unworthily whom we can think of 
as dead, and even they transcend the condition because 
of the love that has baptized them with its own riches 
of affection. Baron Bunsen, looking into the face 
of his dying wife, said : " In thy face, beloved, have 
I seen the Eternal/' 

Eternal Life does not Begin when We Die 

NO inquiry, however interesting, concerning immor- 
tality; no comfort, however consoling, derived 
from such inquiry, and no proofs, however plausible, 
based on such inquiries, can ever be a substitute for the 
life of God in the soul of man. The passion for im- 
mortality is a delusion, comes to nothing in the human 
creature who entertains it, unless there is in that 
human being a master passion for eternal life. And 
eternal life does not begin when you die. I do not 



208 H flDessage for Hil Souls 

suppose it begins when you are born. I think that it 
is part of the life of God in process through the world. 
When once the human soul says: Let me move with 
His motion and keep step with His laws and be right- 
eous with His righteousness and breathe by His inspi- 
ration, then eternal life swallows up all mortality, and 
the sense of identity between the life of God and the 
life of His child has reached the coalescence which 
forbids the thought of death. 

We Assert Immortality 

DO we deny immortality? No. We assert it in 
terms as firm as Socrates used when he turned 
to drink the hemlock, and said : " Have I been so long 
with thee, Crito, and thou dost talk of burying So- 
crates ? Thou shalt bury me if thou canst catch me ; 
but, when thou hast buried my body, do not say thou 
hast buried Socrates." But the Future Life seems so 
long to wait, so far to go. It grows more interesting 
when we have most of our people beyond our ken. It 
is interesting, because it is so full of the love we call 
our own. But it is not remote, for the love is here. 
It is not far to go, for our next of kin belong to our 
daily life. I cannot separate myself from any love 
that has been pure in its relationships; and all rela- 
tionships of love at their best are spiritual and cannot 
be sheared away by any pain or anything that comes 
in our common days. 



H /iDessage for HU Souls 209 

Love is Stronger than Death 

" TESTIS knowing that his hour was come when he 
*J should depart out of this world unto the Father, 
having loved His own, he loved them unto the end." 
This text says, greatly to our comfort, that the pure 
relationships of life are eternal. As the sun sinking 
in our western sky is proof of a day dawning in other 
lands, so this rich nature going down to death with 
the light of love in His eyes undimmed, says to each of 
us: "Now abideth faith, hope, and love; and the 
greatest of these is love." Many floods, though they 
be of the river of death, cannot drown love. Love 
is stronger than death. We do well to interpret 
both the future life and the purpose of God by our 
immortal affections. 

Our Enlarged Conception of Immortality 

THE conception of immortality that answers to the 
passion for it must keep pace with the growing 
worth of man and the increasing measure of God. 
Many difficulties arise from trying to match an en- 
larged experience of religious life to an old pictorial 
heaven. We* want a pictorial presentation of condi- 
tions about which we can know nothing. The diffi- 
culty lies in the fact that we have not yet risen to 
the apprehension that our idea of eternal life and 
consequent immortality, must keep pace with what 
we know of man and God. Man is not the same being 
he was a century ago. New areas have been staked 
out in his mind. The immanence of God has taken 



210 H /Message for HIl Souls 

the place of the absentee Deity, who had to be reached 
by envoys and represented by decrees. The sense for 
immortality must be enlarged in proportion to the 
new discoveries concerning man and God. 

Life the Theme which Persists Forever 

DOCTOR CALTHROP has said: " One can give 
only what he has to give; and God can give 
no death, because He has no death to give." The 
Creator cannot take out of the fathomless resources, 
the endless depths of His life, the thing we call death 
and give it to His children. In all nature there is 
nothing that ever died. Death can no more be 
found than can the beginnings of life. That is the 
marvellous thing, — that life is so profound to the 
thought of the student of the natural world, that no 
plummet can measure its depth; life is so constant, 
that whatever changes in the rhythm of it may appear, 
the theme persists forever. So far as the natural 
world is concerned, "the enemy" called death Is 
dead. The persistent, insistent, continuing tide of 
life is ever at flood, and in the Man of Nazareth, it 
was life that marked a new water-line along the 
shores of time. 



The Burden of Proof Rests on the Doubter. 
N" the hundreds of millions of people in all lands 



i 



this day, unless they are beyond all consciousness 
of their surroundings, — in that vast multitude whom 



H flDessaae for HU Souls 211 

scarcely any man may number, there is but one con- 
sciousness, and its name is life. Yet some trivial 
mind, some debater of the schools, some man who 
would make an amendment to life's resolution, rises 
to say that there shall come a time when life shall be 
no more. Let him prove it ! Let him prove it against 
the consciousness of all the world that is alive, and 
living is the ultimate of all it knows. The onus of 
the proof rests on him who denies it. Nature lends 
him no aid. Eeligion forbids him his thesis ; and all 
love with clinging hands claims its own, with the 
declaration that what love cannot lose, life cannot 
part with. 

Jesus Brought the Good News of Immortality 

6 'TT7H0 hath abolished death and brought life and 
" immortality to light through the gospel." 
The writer meant by this that Jesus had brought into 
the world the news that death had no claim on man ; 
that the life of God could not be extinguished by any- 
thing that happened to him. A man had arrived who 
had found out from God that you might live forever, 
and He had found it out, not by having lived before, 
nor by having yet lived again ; but He had found it out 
by having discovered relationships between Him and 
the Eternal, so that He could not think of his life as 
extinguished without God's dying. I can imagine that 
the universe might pass away, but forever and forever, 
he must be a part of it in terms of real relationship. 
Jesus of Nazareth held that it was possible, from that 



212 H /l&essage for HU Souls 

time on, to think of life without conclusion or period 
set to its being. 

That Survives which is Worthy to Survive 

THE question of the immortal life is, in my judg- 
ment at least, simply a question of capacity. 
When you are asking for the perpetuity of being out 
of your vision, beyond your ken, of some one whom 
you love, what are you asking for? You are asking 
that the thing you knew may remain. Now what did 
you know ? If you were living on the higher levels of 
life, you knew love and solicitude and sweet com- 
munion of kindred spirits and all that makes up the 
soul side of life. You are asking for that which made 
the sanctities of life. You are asking that these shall 
stay that would have survived for you if every possible 
calamity had fallen upon the person but death, — the 
person, not the individual, but the person upon whom 
your love was set. I say, therefore, the business of 
life is to have that soul-condition that is its own 
guarantee of immortality. 

This is a Rational World 

THE order of development in the world is this — 
that in the ascending series called animal, man 
is the last term; in the ascending series called man, 
mind is the last term; in the ascending series called 
mind, the moral sense is the last term. And the moral 
sense at perfect flower is the spiritual life in com- 
munion with God. Twenty millions of years, we are 



a /iDessage for Hil Souls 213 

told, have preceded the highest form of organic life 
on the globe. What myriads of generations have 
passed out of sight while men were preparing to pro- 
duce souls who are the great " friends of those who 
would live in the spirit." But if it is only a prepara- 
tion for causing them to disappear like a moth touched 
by a flame, then this is an irrational world. It is a 
world that has spent millions of years to produce 
nothing, nothing! The splendid heroisms of Jesus 
were then the mere ravings of a fanatic meaning 
nothing. 

Nature Knows no Death 

I BELIEVE that when the hour comes, we may lay 
us down to die with as perfect confidence that the 
sleep is but for a time as that with which last night 
we committed ourselves to the unknown ministry of 
sleep to wake renewed. Nature gives us no warrant 
to add to our vocabulary the word, " death." Nature 
does not know the word " death." Two words she 
knows, — " change " and " continuance," — and is con- 
stant to a constant change. The two great laws of 
constant nature are the conservation of energy and 
the correlation of forces. That which is once present 
is always present; and whatever change may come 
upon its method, no change comes upon its identity. 
Let us put our lives into the great reservoir of the 
living and the constant, and trust God. 



214 H flDessage for HU Souls 

What Can Death Do ? 

WHAT can death do? When the autumn comes 
the leaves that sift down from the branches of 
the trees have been shoved off by the possible growth 
of the next season, and the blossoming May gives 
way to a less ideal aspect of the orchard, its aspect of 
fruit which has no further use for the petals of the 
blossom. What can death do? We have not lived in 
our bodies, so we may dismiss them. It is a fine phi- 
losophy that in the creature grown entirely human, 
death is not the introduction to the future, but the 
dismissal of hindering disabilities that are in the 
present. So runs my dream, and I find myself saying 
with Jean Paul : " When we die, we shall lose our 
sleep, but we shall not lose our dreams." 

If Man Die, There is no God 

I ASK you to consider that the life of God being true, 
there is nothing that can happen to you, unless 
the life of God is hurt in the process. If your God is 
a name in a book, you can lose Him by having the 
book destroyed. If your God is a theory of being, 
some people wiser than you will pass a resolution 
about the theory of being and you will read it and 
find you have no God. If your God is a mere idol, 
and not an imperative ideal, then it may be that 
some iconoclast shall destroy your idol. But if, 
on the other hand, God be nearer than hands and 
feet; if the light of His vision is a light that never 
was on sea nor land; if the consciousness of His 



H flDessafle for Hll Semis 215 

communion is more real than any sacrament of love 
you have ever tasted ; if in all the wandering of your 
days, He is the Great Companion, what can happen 
to you that will not involve His life? When the 
voyager is wrecked, the helmsman is to blame. When 
the discoverer is lost, the guide is reproached. When 
the poor are robbed, the keepers of their wealth are 
charged. And if man die, then there is no God, for 
the fact of his being carries in its bosom all these 
timid fears of ours and quiets them to confidence. 

Men and women have learned that they need not 
be afraid of God; that God is no longer a great 
antagonist, but is the " Great Companion." That 
was the great deliverance of Jesus, when He called 
God by the home name, " Our Father," and said 
" One is your Father, even God, and all ye are 
brethren." Life is not a probation but an oppor- 
tunity; not a discipline but a privilege; and so we 
learn not to fear life. To add zest to life, to raise the 
tide of being, to register a higher mark and intenser 
endeavor, — this is the business of religion. And so 
we learn not to fear the future. If God is the 
Great Companion, He shall not die when I live. If 
one's life is lived in God, can dying cast him out of 
that environment? 



The Passion for Immortality is Legitimate 

YOUE child develops a taste for music; you call it 
a " taste " because it is so slight as yet ; it 
simply smacks of music. You deny yourself and make 



216 h /iBessaae for HH Soulg 

every provision, and if necessary, waste time and 
money on the experiment that is to unfold the thing 
that you believe nature has enfolded in that child. 
You catch at the very construction of your boy's 
hand to see if it is formed on lines that indicate 
manual employment or professional life; and you 
follow the pointing of Nature with a fidelity that is 
almost as admirable as instinct. And yet when you 
find the race all fronting one way, not content to look 
upon the closed eyes of the dead, but turning as those 
disciples did who " stood gazing into the heavens" 
for a man who had been buried in the earth, you are 
not so keen to understand that the passion for im- 
mortality is a legitimate cry and must be answered. 

The Only Rational Solution 

ALL we know of the world is apprehended in terms 
of mind. Every observed thing is observed in 
terms of infinite space and time; and infinite space 
and time are just nothing in that you cannot handle 
them nor see them, nor subject them to the senses. 
Yet they are fundamental concepts in the soul. Do 
you tell me, then, that because the tissue disinte- 
grates, or cells are broken down without repair that 
all that preceded their breaking down and sought to 
produce their repair has gone out of being with them ? 
I must believe that since mind is the perceiver, mind 
is the exhibitor, and that since mind is the ladder by 
which I climb to the heights of being, there is mother- 
mind, mother-stuff out of which mind came, that sur- 



H flDessaQe tot HU Souls 217 

mounts the heights and holds the ladder at the other 
end. This seems the only rational solution. 

Secure in the Life of God 

IN the finest poetry of the Hebrews, in the moment 
of highest exaltation and most supreme expres- 
sion of religious confidence, that confidence was not 
that they were going to another world, but that they 
were secure in the life of God. If God be sure, im- 
mortality is the corollary. If God is consciously sure 
to my intellect, and claimed by the moral passion of 
my own righteousness demanding his being and life, 
offering its sacrifice to his beauty and perfection, then 
He cannot lose me out of his life. Given God, eternal 
life is the necessary corollary and can suffer no re- 
duction of values nor any separation from its ultimate 
purpose. Living, Jesus of Nazareth said : " I am 
not alone, for the Father is with me;" dying, He said : 
" Into Thy hands I commit my spirit." 

There is no Death! 

THEEE is nothing in the dissolution of the body 
to produce transformation of character. The 
Beatitudes were not inaugurated for the future 
life : they were read from the pages of the life of a 
Man who knew their meaning. That Carpenter of 
Nazareth had found out as He looked forward to the 
cross, the blessedness of the " pure in heart," for He 
had " seen God." Those Beatitudes are for today, 
for the Carpenter and for us; for Nazareth and for 



218 H /iDessage tor HU Souls 

the place you stand in now, for our building up of 
the life that is to come, stage by stage, as the life that 
now is. I can not think of God as dead, and being 
a living God I feel his life and He tan not be rid of 
me if He would. I have entered into a covenant to 
live as long as He shall be. " God has no death to 
give : all live unto Him." 

The Evidence of History 

THE fact I want to impress upon you is this: 
that there is no trace of a people who had any 
history that does not furnish the evidence of ex- 
pecting life beyond this life. There is no people, 
even in the time when they were afraid of the gods, 
who were so afraid of the gods but that they were 
more afraid of extinction. All religion begins in 
fear; and if it ends in love, then the span that rests, 
the one end upon this quaking pier of fear and trem- 
bling, and the other upon this immovable and fast- 
established pier of love, is the span of all religious 
experience in the spiritual world. 

We do well to listen to these voices of the past. 
God has ordered the world on such terms that when 
He speaks in the only language you and I can under- 
stand, the language of the human heart and brain, 
we would do well to attend. There is no language 
other than that. If you would know what the soul 
of the Eternal is, hear the speech that belongs to our 
earth life, the speech of the gravitations of our nature 
that are eloquent of the will of God. 



H 



H /EDessage foe 2111 Souls 219 



OXESTY is not a transaction, it is a state of 
mind. 



We must not deal with an offender until we are 
more sorry for him than hurt ourselves. 

Sin is not being up to one's best, and so, through 
duty to society as a sacred thing, making it harder 
for any one to be good. 

The purpose of life is the education of the emotions 
in terms of reason, the passionate pursuit of right- 
eousness. 

Affection should meet in its source, not in its 
object. Enduring human love is impossible without 
love of the same things. 

The expectant soul is beginning to get wisdom. 

Be enamored of goodness — in love with the 
eternal. 

To deal simply is to deal greatly. 

Do not waste power on things that do not count. 
Have no days of unending seriousness. Let things go. 

Let those who seek the responsibilities of life be 
humble. 

We can not keep blows from falling, but we can 
behave well when they fall. 

The best things can not be proved. 



220 H ZlDessage for Bll Souls 



A 



N" absorbing self-respect is the greatest and best 
thing in a noble soul. 



When the soul really seeks, the intellect is still. 

We are saved by our admirations. 

God has ordained we shall have the passion to find 
Him. 

We call God incapable, when it is we that are de- 
spairing. 

Desire not safety, but growth. 

We are put into the world not so much to do a 
certain work as to be a certain thing. 

If the hands have fastened on the life line, it does 
not make any difference what waves pass over the soul. 

Grief is the time that elapses between the blow and 
our adjustment to it. 

The bankruptcies of life never touch the riches of 
the soul. 

To take away the pain without the cause is anaes- 
thesia. 

When life grows complicated, God becomes infinite. 

You can not believe in God and luck. 

The possibility of growth imposes the obligation 
to grow. 



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 



THE manuscript of this little volume of " Medita- 
tions/' selected by Doctor Thomas Roberts Slicer 
some time before his death, May 29, 1916, has been 
prepared for publication by loving hands. Grateful 
acknowledgement is due Mr. Herbert Taylor for the 
gift of the manuscript to the Women's Alliance of All 
Souls' Church ; to Miss Maud Perry Mills for time and 
thought given both to editing and manufacture; to 
Miss Florence Wier Gibson for valuable help and 
advice in the editing of the volume ; to Mrs. Frances C. 
Brines for the contribution of the short quotations, 
carefully treasured during the sixteen years of Doctor 
Slicer's ministry to All Souls' Church; to Mrs. 
William Herbert, with whom the idea of the publica- 
tion of the memorial volume originated. The 
Alliance expresses cordial appreciation to Mrs. Will- 
iam L. Sullivan, Mr. Charles H. Strong and Mr. 
George E. Bishop, for their advice and co-operation. 



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